Provost’s General Education Development Program Proposal (1 April 2005)

Principal Investigator: Nancy Shoemaker, Associate Professor, History, Storrs Campus

nancy.shoemaker@uconn.edu, ext. 6-5926, U-2103

Proposed Course Title: HIST 1XX: THE HISTORIAN AS DETECTIVE

Course Objectives: This new course intended for general education’s Humanities content area will (1) immerse students entirely in the primary sources historians use to make sense of the past, and (2) involve students directly in a hands-on approach to learning so that they will experience historical study as exploration, discovery, and interpretation. “The Historian as Detective” addresses several items listed in the grant competition announcement and satisfies the goals of general education in multiple ways. It will involve students in faculty research, it will promote critical thinking by making students analyze raw material to construct their own narratives and arguments, and it can be taught as either a single W course of 19 students or in a large lecture format, in which periodically students would be broken down into sections for collaborative workshops. The course proposal to GEOC will be for both non-W and W versions to maximize flexibility and accommodate individual instructors’ preferences.

Background: The new general education requirements present the History Department with an opportunity to develop creative courses radically different from the traditional means of history instruction that students are accustomed to at the high-school level. High-school history courses, Advanced Placement, and many of UConn’s existing 100-level history courses, such as “HIST 101: Western Traditions,” lead students on a Disney-esque ride through a perfectly manicured past, organized chronologically and packed with “facts.” Those who construct this illusion of an uncomplicated, fully knowable past–the instructor in collusion with a published history survey textbook--hide the labor, the dirt, the doubts, and the disagreements. Students in these classes believe that all they need do is memorize facts and regurgitate them in a final exam. This proposed course will instead put students behind the scenes, present them with the documentary shards of a past event, and allow them to encounter firsthand the excitement of the chase, the joyful satisfaction of problem-solving, and the allure of historical curiosity as infinite space constantly beckoning.

The basic idea for this proposal comes from the highly successful “New Approaches” course developed at the University of Massachusetts by historians Stephen Nissenbaum and Paul Boyer. They adopted the 1692 Salem witchcraft incident as the focal piece for students’ immersion experience, and the course soon became the most popular history course at UMass with hundreds of students enrolled in it. Historians nationwide know of the course through the two books Boyer and Nissenbaum published on the topic--one an award-winning monograph called Salem Possessed and the other a documents collection; undergraduate student and graduate assistant participation in the research process richly informed these works and brought Boyer and Nissenbaum the regard of other historians not only for their original interpretation of the primary sources but also for their innovative teaching. History head Altina Waller is an alumnus of the New Approaches course, having served as a graduate assistant at UMass. She also taught variations of it at other institutions, using as her thematic focus such incidents as the Lizzie Borden murder case and the Hatfield-McCoy feud. UConn history faculty Richard Brown, Cornelia Dayton, and I have similarly incorporated aspects of this approach in existing UConn course offerings at the 200-level. A 100-level history course, taught by instructors working in a team with graduate assistants, would be able to reach many more students and reach them early in their college careers, so that their introduction to a college education would also give them an immediate awareness of history as a creative process in which critical reading, thinking, and writing skills are paramount.

The Plan: Other instructors currently interested in teaching this course besides myself are Altina Waller and Robert Gross, who would use as their case study the “race riot” at the Prudence Crandall school in Canterbury, Connecticut, and Cornelia Dayton, with Salem witchcraft as her theme. My course–to be offered in fall, 2006, and every year or two thereafter–would have as its topic “Mutiny on the Whaleship Junior.” Although any historian working in any time period or geographic region of the world could offer this course, local history topics offer several advantages. Many students will know of the places where these events happened and can realize through their own experiences how the past contrasts with the present. In addition, the many museums and archives in the region make original documents accessible for student use in the classroom and present opportunities for field trips. While our motive for picking topics like witchcraft, axe-murderers, riots, and mutinies might seem sensationalist, these stories come to us already packaged as suspenseful mystery stories that can draw students in by the puzzles presented and inspire them to want to solve the “crime.” In the process, however, they will learn about the subtleties and problems of weighing evidence and about how the world’s varied social, cultural, economic, and political settings intersect with individual people’s expectations and experiences.

So, why the Junior mutiny? Although I am not researching it specifically (my current research is on American Indians in the New England whaling industry), it is the only horrific, blood-curdling whaling incident for which there is as yet no historical study. Nathaniel Philbrick’s best-selling In the Heart of the Sea dealt with the Essex catastrophe, and two other books have studied the mutinies on the Globe and Sharon. General education students would thus actually be engaged in original research that would contribute to historical scholarship: they would be the first historians trying to figure out how and why the mutiny happened and what its larger consequences were. Mixed in with the mutiny itself are all the pressing historical dilemmas of that time and place: labor relations, racial tensions, U.S. global expansion, the gendered space of whaleships and the eroticism and exoticism of whaling ports, and environmental issues.

A development grant would give me the time and resources to do three types of groundwork to realize the course by fall, 2006. First, I need to work with our department head and graduate director to develop a structure, or variety of structures, for implementing the course in a manner suitable for all the case studies. For example, I would teach the course in fall, 2006 as a W course with perhaps about 100 students: How many graduate assistants would I need? What would be the section size? I would probably lecture once a week, and we would then break into workshop sections two days a week: Is this feasible? Is there classroom space for these discussion sections? Etc. Second, I need to collect the primary sources that will make up the course material. There is a wonderful memoir of the Junior’s fatal voyage, which even has a surprise ending as we learn that the memoirist was put on trial as a mutineer. There are also copies of the logbook, the crew list, U.S. customs office papers, manuscript census forms, newspaper accounts, court records, and many other documents to gather. Third, I anticipate that course assignments will consist of periodic short papers evaluating a primary source and a large collaborative writing project due at the end of the course; however, these assignments need to be designed so as to build on each other and make students proficient critical readers of historical documents by the end of the course.

Assessment Plan: Having worked on a UConn initiative involving two departments, Math and History, in an assessment of our undergraduate programs, I have benefited greatly from the guidance of Desmond McCaffrey of UConn’s Instructional Design office as to the latest assessment techniques. If Desmond were available, I would ask him to help me through the process of devising a rubric for this course to guide me in determining if students are indeed realizing course objectives. I would develop this rubric using educational psychologist Sam Wineburg’s findings (in Historical Thinking and other Unnatural Acts, 2001), which illuminated how various types of readers dissect and interpret primary documents differently. Wineburg showed how students at different levels read for information (“facts”) and quickly arrive at dead-end answers that satisfy them. In contrast, historians read documents in their context and, when faced with a strange or new primary document, ask of it endless questions. The depth of one’s “historical thinking” can thus often be seen by how many and what kinds of questions readers ask of primary documents.

Vice Provost Veronica Makowsky

March 28, 2005

Re: Provost’s General Education Course Development Grants

Dear Veronica:

I am writing to offer my strong support for the course, “The Historian as Detective,” that my colleague Nancy Shoemaker is proposing and plans to develop with the help of the Provost’s General Education Course Development Grant. This course is uniquely equipped to involve students in the inquiry method of actually doing history rather than reading about it. Faculty members could offer diverse units based on their own research and interests, thus involving students in original research at the General Education level. We plan to offer this course at least once a year, for several years. I believe that it will bring to our curriculum a new approach to the study of history that will also sharpen students’ critical thinking and analytical skills.

Sincerely,

Altina Waller

Head, History