HIST 100: Engineering The Past

15.1 Reflection

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I have for the most part enjoyed this course and like the fact that it was a bit different than classes I have taken in the past. I feel that it is always hard to change the way we learn/teach as I went to school in the 90’s and it was very heavy with you learn the information, test on it, and then move on to the next. I know that it has not changed from that mindset and is in fact worse with the no child left behind testing that is now applied. School has become so regimented for everyone that it has lost a lot of the practicality and thinking that should go behind it. With that said when we do have opportunities to think and be creative the majority of us don’t know what to do and it is usually very hard. Then, we end up having to go back to the same old mindset so it is quite an inconvenience to change the way we think for 4 months and have to put in double the work because we are so use to having everything laid out and regimented.

I do not feel that school prepares you for the workforce, I say this because it has become so regimented and usually there is not a lot of thinking involved it is learn this concept, test, dump it because you have to learn the next concept. Too much information is being taught in such a short amount of time that the actuality of retaining everything is very small. From my experience you get a baseline understanding from school and each position you get you will have to learn the culture and the way that they do business.

I did enjoy the diversity of material that was gone over in this course. I was not sure what to expect with the name but I love history and figured I would give it a shot. From thinking about the way historians analyze, to water and then to the worlds fair. It was really great material and even as hard as it was for me ,as I am not a creative person, I do feel that I learned a lot more from this course and will actually remember it.

I don’t think it matters if this class is taught face-to-face or online. I think it should be known from the beginning that this class is taught differently, the assignments need to be more spread out, and more feedback and grade needs to be given throughout the course. I think the hard thing about “creative” learning is the subjectivity of it. We are told to voice our thoughts or opinions and use a medium we want to use to express the information and then we are graded by an instructor that has their own set of thoughts. I hope that in some way this may help going forward. Thanks for the interesting class, it really did make me step outside of my comfort zone and made me think about things differently.

11.2 First Reflection of the Fair

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Based on what I’ve read so far, to page 127, I think the most significant issue or tension in the United States in the 1880s and 1890s was the gap between the moral and the wicked in big cities, such as Chicago. Some of the other issues and tensions that were going on during that time were global economic depression, labor unions on the rise and union strikes, big business was on the rise, political corruption, and floods of new immigrants from over in Europe. I want to focus on the issue of declining morals in the big cities though. On page 12 in The Devil in the White City, Erick Larson says, “Everywhere one looked the boundary between the moral and the wicked seemed to be degrading. Elizabeth Cady Stanton argued in favor of divorce. Clarence Darrow advocated free love. A young woman named Borden killed her parents.” These are some examples of the changing times and how morals were declining and changing. There was also nightclubs, prostitution, bars, etc. which highlighted the changing times because before the 1880s and 1890s it was not very easy to find these kinds of services as they were fewer in number and weren’t really promoted. That period of time was filled with “turmoil and grief” as Larson said.

I think Larson has chosen to intertwine the story of the fair with that of Holmes because he wants to show the good and evil that occurred during the time when they were constructing the fair. Burnham represented the prosperity and good times of the fair, although he did overcome some tough obstacles. Dr. H.H. Holmes represented the evil during this time as you can see in this section from the novel, “It was so easy to disappear, so easy to deny knowledge, so very easy in the smoke and din to mask that something dark had taken root. This was Chicago, on the eve of the greatest fair in history.” This can be found on page 12 as well.

So we can see that there were many problems during this time such as promoting divorce, advocating free love, people murdering other people at a very high rate, prostitution, bars, nightclubs, and unsuspecting serial killers on the loose, which went unnoticed. As well it was fairly simple to find out why Larson intertwined two different characters/plots in order to achieve the distinction between the good and evil of the times.