I was working with a High School Government class and got frustrated I couldn’t find a concise summary of voter discrimination.  Everything I could find that talked about voter discrimination was buried in pages and pages of analysis from someone’s college thesis.  This taught me a lot about how much inaccuracy and ambiguity gets published by universities.  It’s not a recent issue.

Also, I wasn’t satisfied with the tables and lists that I found in these papers.  They often ended with “etc.” and presented the information was not going to be interesting to high school students.  This was about the time I realized that I should switch research projects and so I could make something that didn’t exist yet.  I planned something else for the lesson and talked to my professor about switching projects.  We made arrangements for me to change projects and I got to work.

The research was hard, but I knew that going in.  Fitting the pieces together is always the challenge in the puzzle of data analysis.  My first thought was to do a video, like the “1000 Years Time Lapse of Europe” some teachers show in high school.  But then, I realized that a website would let me build the entire lesson into a single spot for students to access.  After some tinkering around in Google Sites, I realized it had all the functionality I would need to present the data, so I started building out the website.

You can find his website here.

 

“In an act of grief and rage and love” is my final project for my History J425 class I created to learn more about the ways in which the queer community felt and communicated the experience of AIDS through protest, artistic creations and various forms of self-documentation in America during the late 20th century. When you lose someone important to you, many refer to this empty space where the person once was as almost having a physical presence of its own -- a feeling that this space the person once occupied will never be filled.

My project intends to look at what people will do with that absence, what they will create in those gaps, and how they react to the loss itself. What I have to show from my time spent researching is what I like to call part essay, part zine, part art project, part diary, part obituary, and part something else I cannot name. In other words it is a deeply vulnerable partially interactive political and historical zine that is organized to walk readers through the stages of grief. An academic essay is not the most approachable form of storytelling, and there was something too sterile and impersonal to turn in a traditional paper when I imagined what I wanted to make. I decided on this format because I wanted it to be as personal as it could get, and there was an intimacy in being able to share something I spent days creating in the hands of my reader. I was lucky enough for my professor  to encourage my sideways approach to history in a way I saw as most fitting. There is only one physical copy of it.

The zine is available here.

 

Throughout my entire educational career, I had always had an interest in elevating women’s stories. As a teaching candidate I can see in the curriculum how often it’s the man’s story being told. I set out to counteract this narrative through my Hist-J425 project! I researched and created a website geared towards teachers and student to use in the classroom. I wanted to correct the film industry’s narrative of women spies during WWII. So often in media today, women spies are high sexualized to the point that people assume that sleeping with the enemy are all that these women accomplished. I wanted teachers to teach their students that this just wasn’t the case and that women spies had a wide variety of duties.

One of the biggest challenges in creating this project was sorting through hours of Holocaust victim testimonies. There were so many stories that I watched and listened to that it was hard to pick and choose which stories to incorporate into my project. I tried to incorporate lots of videos, so people could hear the stories from the amazing survivors. Another big challenge was narrowing down what kind of jobs I wanted to focus on. My project started as looking at a broad variety of jobs women held during the war, but I was able to narrow it down to focus on job women spies and the different categories of that job.

Overall, I would say that J425 allowed me the creative freedom that I have been craving while doing research. There was plenty of support along the way from Dr. Schlesinger that allowed me to end up with a project that I’m proud of.

You can find a link to the website here.

 

The Studebaker company has always been in the background of my life growing up in the South Bend area. From field trips, to baseball games, to plays, the infrastructure and memory of the factory has remained present in my life and in the life of South Bend. While this memory of Studebaker was never anything I thought about until I started this project during the fall of 2021, I have a deep love of history about labor in the United States, especially when it comes to the history of union struggles. These struggles I remember being present in Studebaker history before they closed their doors in South Bend ahead of Christmas in December, 1963.

I had originally thought that I wanted to research the initial reactions to the closure of the factory, but found that there was very little in the way of information about that in the historical record. At least I thought that, until I found out that many of the workers of the factory had been interviewed through the Studebaker Oral History Project, 1984-1985. These interviews were conducted by the Indiana University Center for the Study of History and Memory. This discovery changed the focus of my research, with the help of Professor Eric Sandweiss, who was my advisor during the project. I focused my research on how the factory has been remembered in South Bend.

The interviews from the 1980s gave me a better understanding of how people remembered the factory two decades after the closure. Working on this project gave me a better understanding of how memory affects the history we tell ourselves, but also how the history we remember is reflected on the physical landscape around us.