Week one--overview: What is history—big history, little history, events, attitudes, memory, narrative, chronicle. Hows, whys, whats, whens, what ifs. Keeping close to home. Creating knowledge and what everybody knows. The history of Hogan Rd....
Assignment: a history of your life, touching on your life...and history.
Week two—developing a topic
* Genealogy
* Local history
* Family history
* Oral history vs. big or official history
* History of a corner of your technology
Assignment: five possible areas, five possible semester topics, five brainstorms
Assignment: write a short essay on you and research, you and sources, you and investigation, you and research papers
Week three—finding stuff; the universality of research outside the schoolhouse; the time-waste factor in research; questions, answers, and information; dealing with uncertainty and suspending closure: skepticism
* Sources—primary, secondary, tertiary
* Internet--search engines, newsgroups, listservs
* Interviews, phone, live
* Email, letters
* Books, newspapers, etc
* Photos, film, video
* Oral history
* Paid sources
Assignment: preliminary research to see if sources seem useful and available
Assignment: write a short essay proposing a topic, describing your motivation for choosing the topic, your research plans and hopes
Week four—starting to put it together
* Goals of research
* Goals of research writing
* Pure information or answers to prior questions or questions evolving after research?
Assignment: read Stilgoe handout and write reaction
Weeks five and six—beginning the writing
* Organization, notes, Yahoo briefcase, AOL portfolio, blog and web storage, computers, disks, memory sticks, printing-out vs saving, taperecording, photos
* Notes, source list accuracy, plagiarism, chains of knowledge transmission, dialogues between readers and writers
* Training oneself to skim. Fitting things together. Drawing conclusions. Testing conclusions. Speculation. Informed speculation.
Assignment: begin researching.
Assignment: write introductory or background material for paper
Week seven: skepticism revisited. Ethics: it must have happened this way, so…; Michael Belleisles, hoaxes; objectivity, subjectivity, propaganda; fact, fiction, faction. Obligations to sources, readers, self, future.
Assignment: continue research
Assignment: write rationale for paper
Week eight, nine—writing, structure and development. Organizing material. Logical, time sequence, topic order?
Assignment: write!
Week ten. Developing and annotating sources. Citations. Layout, style issues, tone.
Assignment: write conclusion, begin annotating sources.
Week eleven.
Assignment: first draft due
Week twelve. Seeing what you have--simplifying, complicating
Assignment: revisions
Week thirteen: final touches.
Assignment: final draft due
Week fourteen: class presentations
Week fifteen: dissemination & publishing. Creating your blog and putting up your paper; introduction to paper for blog; sending out blog address.
Week 1
I crash on the couch and catch the History Channel with a remote in one hand and a bottle of Ballantine Ale in the other. There’s JFK: “Ask not what your country can do for you--,” he says in that Boston accent like no other Boston accent I ever heard growing up in Boston. His hair blows in the January wind and the voiceover says a new youth and vigor had come to Washington.
Then it’s Castro and the missile crisis and, whoops, we nearly blew up the world! But it didn’t quite happen so on we go to…
Martin Luther King, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, dreaming his dream, his voice still lifting the hairs on the back of my neck. A little balance needed so we’re given us Malcolm X. on some street corner ranting about the white devils which segues into…
The motorcade in Dallas. The horse with the backward boots and no rider. The country in mourning, but not for long because here come the four lads from Liverpool in skinny pants and jackets with no lapels and those sappy harmonies.
Ringo’s drumming turns into distant explosions, machine gun fire and dim figures in the jungle. We get a little ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ for background music, just in case we don’t get the point.
Suddenly, some turkey with a beard to his ankles, tie-dyed tee, and granny glasses is flashing a peace sign. His old lady with indescribably filthy bare feet and center-parted hair says, “If the people would only come together.”
Watts burns, more distant explosions in the jungle, mud at Woodstock and more hippies standing around VW buses talking about peace, justice, and dope. And that’s pretty much the end. See ya, sixties, and hello disco, long gas lines, and Jimmy Carter.
I finish my beer, flick the remote, and lie there in silence, annoyed. That may be tv’s sixties. It’s certainly the same film footage I saw on tv in the sixties. But it wasn’t the sixties for me. I wasn’t in any of that footage. I didn’t live in the sixties, in some history channel footage with musical backgrounds. My sixties are mine and private and don’t belong to just anyone with a remote.
The sixties begin with white ankle socks and a pair of Weejun penny loafers. They’re just called penny loafers, of course—only a jerk would actually stick pennies in there! My mother fought against buying me those loafers all through the late fifties—did I realize they wouldn’t support my ankles? They’d give me flat feet? That gravel would get in them? That the stitching would tear and the backs would run over. Lace shoes were what I wanted. No, I did not, ma, and finally I got my way.
Of course, it was the early sixties and that meant your parents were generally right, and indeed, my ankles hurt, my stitching tore, and my backs ran over. But I ran with the crowd finally and nothing was cooler or more casual than sitting in school, arching one’s foot and letting the heel of the loafer dangle in the breeze.
However, by the time in the sixties I was ready for college, penny loafers no longer did it. Downstairs in Levine’s Store for Men and Boys on Maine street in Waterville were moccasins—kind of a deconstructed loafer with a rawhide lace running through grommets. All the drawbacks of a loafer and even less distance between me and the road. My mother moaned when she saw them, gave me up as a lost soul. I wore those puppies into the ground, resoling them, restitching them, and when they’d finally head in, heading down to Levine’s with my $7.95 for a new pair.
I never gave up on mocs, but the sixties hit me pretty good in 1964 and I got a yen for the pointy toed, elastic sided, stack heeled black boots the Beatles wore. Winkle-pickers, they were called, or Mersey boots. They squeezed a man’s toes like high heels squeeze a woman’s. My mother took one look and sat me down for a serious talk about orthopedics, spinal alignment etc etc etc. Sorry, ma., I said. They’re cool, they’re me, and that’s that.
Except a funny thing happened by 1969. Others might hjave been running around barefoot or in sandals, but I started working outdoors jobs and when I wasn’t at work got interested in hiking and being in the woods and swamps around Old Town, and the mocs and winkle-pickers really didn’t fit the bill any more. I found myself in orange-colored Georgia Giant waffle-stompers at work and play. They were comfy, practical, and if they weren’t cool…well, who needed cool? When my ma saw them she cocked her head as if to say, ‘I wish he was in something a little more stylish, but at least these will give him that vital ankle support he hasn’t had since 1959.’
Yes, the sixties began with an impractical 15 year old, trying to look cool and knowing everything and ended with a married man of 25, trying to be practical and wondering what would come next. Man and boy, heel and toe, I walked every step of my way from Dec 31, 1959 to Dec 31 1969.