Teaching American History - Day 3

Today was a long day at Lowell, Massachussetts, the site of the Bootts Cotton Mill factory complex that was in operation from the early 1820s until 1954.  Lowell was the cradle of the American Industrial Revolution, providing the basic blueprint for both labor and owners in the early stages of American Capitalism.  The factory floor holds nearly 50 weaving machines, only about 20 of them were in operation so that we could get a sense of the noise that it might have sounded like when all 100 original machines would have been operating.

Remarkable to me was the re-invention of the factory over the course of nearly a century and a half.  Today, some parts of the complex have been converted into housing, while other parts have been modernized to provide space for businesses.  The Boarding House Commons is a large grass area fronted by a stage for annual concerts.  This would have been impossible in the past as the entire area was originally occupied by the boarding houses that the Lowell Girls (the young farming girls from as far away as 200 miles) who were the primary workforce in the 1800s.  When I compare the scene at Boott Cotton Mill with analogous delapidated factories strewn around the Bulgarian countryside which are to this day rotting away since the fall of the Soviet Union over 20 years ago, it is remarkable that there is the American re-tasking of industrial space to accomodate the needs of communities and of the economy large and small.  Although the Boott complex is profoundly institutional and almost prison-like in appearance, it is a remarkable space nonetheless for how it was used and reused over time, evolving to retain relevance to the community that brought it about.

Here is the raw footage from the factory floor showing the weaving machines at work.  You can see the drive trains and axles connected by leather straps spinning, all of this was initially run by water power (hence the canals), then by steam power, and now finally by electricity.  Note the vaporizers in the ceiling that are spraying the air to keep the room humid so that the cotton does not dry out and snap as it is manipulated by the machines.  Also note the speed with which the thread shuttle is zipping back and forth across the weaving providing the string.  Originally, these shuttles were moved across by hand, but with increasing mechanization, they were taken over by a simple spring-loaded gearing mechanism that allowed for far greater speed, up to 55 yards of cloth per day per machine (modern machines are about 1000 times more productive than these!).

Teaching American History - Day 2

Day Two was a most remarkable day.  We began at Faneuil Hall (pronounce it like Daniel) which is the famed Town Meeting hall for Boston with a short introductory lecture on all we were about to see by Merril, the National Parks tour leader for old Boston.  He articulated the pre-revolutionary period with great enthusiasm and insight, saying things that I had heard a number of times but had never quite fully taken in until his presentation.  We then went out onto the former wharf line, which is now all new land with massive development (and which is only yards away from the Hall).  You would never think of it unless you saw it that had we been transported back in time a couple of centuries, we would have been standing in Boston Harbor and not on terra firma.

This was very interesting: here is the likely site of the actual Boston Massacre.  How no one got run over at the time, I just don't know!!!

Just kidding.

We then marched off to see Paul Revere's house, then off to his statue, all along the way receiving an impressive and detailed history lesson on Boston and the politics and players involved in what was about to happen on the eve of the Tea Party. Also, the house was restored some time ago by a curator who was convinced that no pre-revolutionary homes in Boston were more than two stories tall, so he had the third floor of the house removed to make it look authentic again.  Turns out, the third floor was original!  Lost forever, now.  Great Stuff!

We then regrouped after lunch above Boston Commons across from the Statehouse and in front of the Robert Gould Shaw & the 54th Massachussetts Colored Regiment, whose memorial you would likely mistake for just a bus stop unless you realized that it was what it purported to be.  I had imagined this monument situated somewhere and somehow else, but between the history of it apparently being too big to go inside the statehouse and too important to not remind the members of the state legislature about what their responsibilities were, it got put where it got put.  Interesting.  Also, a couple of weeks beforehand, someone had broken off the sword that Shaw is holding in his right hand pointed down to the ground.  The rangers said that it keeps getting vandalized like that!  What was also interesting was that the memorial has the men marching southwest out of town along Beacon Street astride Boston Common, and the rangers provided a photo from the 1890s (if believe) showing the surviving troops marching beside the statue but coming back into town northeast up Beacon in front of the memorial.  Very cool!

We then trekked off on the Freedom Trail and this was the most remarkable part of the day's journey.  Going to be making use of a lot of the information about the African American abolitionist movement staged out of Boston and who the major players were and how they were in so many ways related to one another either by blood or by sentiment/resentment.  This is one of the narrow alleys that fugitive slaves and their rescuers used to evade the federal slave catchers who patrolled the streets of Boston in search of runaway slaves.  It winds back and through several homes and other passages and ends up in front of the site of the Black Meeting Hall and the home of one of the most important underground railroad rescuers.  Even more cool!

Teaching American History - Boston Field Study Day 1

HARVARD UNIVERSITY

After a long flight from Sacramento through Minneapolis to Boston, I spent the day touring around Harvard University and getting myself acquainted with the T Line metro system for Boston.  Tomorrow we will be heading into the historical center of Boston for an extensive series of field studies.  Today, I want to reflect on the "free day" we had today to just get adjusted and moved into our dormitory rooms at Boston University, and to decide for ourselves what we would like to see and do before the real work begins tomorrow.  This was a greatly appreciated day, and as I sit and type out this blog entry this evening, I think about how full this coming week will of necessity be.

Starting with Harvard University was interesting and rewarding because it is, despite all of the whoopla forwarded by other universities later, the oldest institute of higher education in the United States, predating the formation of the United States by 151 years (HU founded in 1638, USA founded in 1789).  Although clearly a modern university in many ways, the history of the institution is literally chiseled on the facades of all of the major buildings, whose own date of erection is given in two ways: first in the actual year of completion, and second, in the year in which Harvard University itself existed when that building was completed.  It is remarkable to look at a recent building and see that Harvard had already been around for two or more centuries before that building was likely even conceived!

Memorial Hall was opened in 1878, and by that time Harvard University had already been a going concern for 240 years.  Memorial Hall is striking in another way, it is much akin to the architecture of Central Europe, in particular that of the cathedrals in Prague, Czech Republic and a number of imperial retreats throughout the countrysides of the Czech Republic, Austria, Hungary, and Slovakia.  It is a towering structure, and its colorful tiled roof is both beautiful and striking for its difference from all of the other buildings around it.  It is also in a way out of place, which lends it a degree of beauty and intrigue that a more conventional structure of the time would have sorely lacked.

In wandering around Harvard today, I was struck by the profound diversity of its student body, that like almost all educational institutions in the United States of America, it is a rich collection of everyone from everywhere.  The big difference, however, is that here, in this experiment called America, again and again, it is demonstrated that anyone from anywhere can get along with anyone from anywhere else, especially in the rareified pursuit of high education.  I think I need to do much more with Harvard University in the AP United States History courses, something more that will begin to impress upon my students the deep and abiding influence that this university has had and continues to have over the American academic psyche.  Although in many ways Harvard is much like many of its kin, an expansive place of brick edifice and green space shaded by a plethora of trees, but illuminated by the persistent fire of human curiosity about...well, everything!  I think I need to do more to bring forward what is both unique and ubiquitous about this first of American universities, both then and now.