HIST 100: Engineering The Past

Final group project: The 1893 World’s Fair

The project

Create a digital project about the 1893 Columbian Exposition that addresses this prompt:

The planners of the World’s Fair engineered the fair in two sections—the White City and the Midway Plaisance—each of which was intended to be educational in some sense. Fairgoers’ actual experiences, however, may have been wildly divergent from what the planners intended. This raises some questions:

  • What lessons did the Fair planners intend visitors to learn about the U.S. and the world?
  • What habits, beliefs, and values underlay these intended educational experiences/lessons?
  • What habits, beliefs, and values did the Fair’s structures, activities, and opportunities actually present?

Use evidence from The Devil in the White City and other online sources (see “Additional resources” at the bottom of this page) to support your answers to these questions.

(To be clear: instead of answering these questions in list form, you should answer them in a well-constructed project.)

What qualifies as a digital project?

The medium is up to you. Possibilities include, but are not limited to:

  • an essay illustrated extensively with images and/or video (e.g., clips from a documentary, footage from this simulation) used as evidence to support your claims
  • a video that draws on similar resources to the essay described above, narrated by your group
  • a “podcast episode” that uses audio description, music, and sound to capture the fair and make your argument to listeners
  • a virtual tour of the fair, using whatever digital tools you’d like, but that makes a clear argument
  • a carefully curated Instagram account or Pinterest board with an accompanying essay making an argument and explaining your choice of images
  • a WordPress.com, Tumblr, or Blogspot.com website with carefully organized information that answers the questions in the prompt

Be imaginative! There are so many easy-to-use digital tools at your disposal. However, please don’t use Prezi, Slideshare, PowerPoint, or similar media—unless you make them into a video with voice-over. Why? These are actually pretty terrible ways to share information, particularly if you use text and/or bulleted lists, and they’re rarely used well.

In the end, it needs to be something that can be shared online. You can post or embed it into a post on the course blog, or you can link to it from a blog post.

You will work in groups of three to five people—but ideally each group will have four people.

Advice on forming groups

  • Look at the list of students and e-mail addresses in the Google doc I shared with everyone in the class.
  • Find the names of students whose blog posts you have found interesting.
  • Write to those students, offering to work with them.
  • Try to complement one another’s strengths and weaknesses—e.g., writing, editing, digital savvy, organizing, research.
  • Be sure you can find a group whose members can all meet (in person or virtually) at the same time.

A few very important notes about group work

  • Everyone in your group will receive the same grade.
  • Everyone should contribute to the research and writing portions of this project. I understand some people might be more digitally savvy than others, so use your best judgment regarding both talents and workload to determine who among the group’s members might be best at leading the technological aspects of the project.
  • If there are issues with your group, I need to know as soon as they occur. Common issues:
    • a student not contributing sufficiently to the group’s efforts.
    • a controlling student who tries to make the project his or her own and doesn’t let others contribute to decision-making in the group.
  • You will have an opportunity, at the end of your group work, to submit a confidential evaluation of your own contributions as well as those of your group’s members, so please keep notes on individual members’ contributions.

Scope of the project

You’re undoubtedly asking yourselves, “How big should this project be?” “How many words?” “If we make a video or a podcast, how long should it be?”

I want you to put aside questions of quantity and think instead about quality. This project is worth 25% of your grade. For comparison, all of your blog posts and comments in the course are worth 30% of your grade. This is also a group project, and it should reflect the scope and quality resulting from the thoughtful efforts of several people.

Your project should be interesting, well-researched, and polished. If you have concerns about what this means, I encourage your group to come see me. If you can’t make my normal office hours, schedule an appointment now, as in the last month of the semester, professors’ time often becomes both more in demand and less available.

Additional resources

You may use The Devil in the White City, of course, but there are also plentiful primary and secondary sources online related to the 1893 World’s Fair, and you should feel free to use historical images from any of them. Of particular note are The Book of the Fair, the Illinois Institute of Technology site on the Fair, and the Library of Congress or the Internet Archive (simply enter your keywords, e.g. “1893 World’s Fair” or “Columbian Exposition,” into the search box).

And, of course, Albertsons Library’s databases will also turn up a number of peer-reviewed secondary sources. I encourage you to cite a few of these to back up your assertions.

Due date

Your group project must be on the blog by Friday, May 6 at 10 p.m. (Why May 6 at 10 p.m.? That’s when final exams end for the semester.)

As always, I’m here to help. Please come see me if you have any questions or want guidance.