Final Thoughts On Public History Class

What a semester! Practically living in downtown Lansing's libraries wasn't the worst way to finish out my undergraduate history classes. I had a good time working with everyone on the group project, and I think what we ended up producing was something to be proud of.

This class also contributed to something of a career-path crisis; I liked doing research for this class and for my honors thesis last year so much that I was having pretty significant second thoughts about doing a student teaching internship next year. However, my four hours a week at Lansing Eastern High was a reminder of how much I do look forward to being a teacher, probably still more than going to grad school. I guess I'll never know for sure.

Audience-awareness was another thing that really affected me from this class. I wrote a 60 page paper last semester, but I didn't really think about an audience. I was almost just writing it for my advisor; that seems like a lot of work for one person to read it.

My final project lost a little steam when I ran out of sources just short of what I wanted; the inevitable pressures of the end of a term also contributed to this. I still enjoyed the process of trying to create a little public history.

Lastly, I'll hearken back to my first blog post, in which I discuss blogging. It turns out that I kind of like it. So, while this is probably my last post on this blog, I fully intend to make one chronicling my student teaching internship next fall. It's possible that only my dad will read it; I'll still write it for a wider audience because I like to stay optimistic.

CADL Farming

Yesterday I paid the MHC yet another visit to see if I could get some background reading on the Michigan Masons. Since all of the citations from the MSU library that looked promising were actually at the Library of Michigan, I once again made the trip down to my new home.
I struck out. I got about 100 words of usable information out of four books. Awesome. So when the local history archive opened up at nearby CADL, I went to see if they had anything for me. A certain David Votta was to save me from a worthless trip downtown.
He found a nice picture of Lansing's temple previous to the 1925 one that I'm researching, we found a cool timeline of Lansing history, and he even sent a message to some movers and shakers in the local History community about my project. Lastly, I was able to find a couple of potentially handy newspaper clippings.
Things are moving along, and I might actually have something resembling a final project here by next week!

I'm thinking I should have told the Census I lived at MHC

Not really but I've been there a lot this semester. I went to the library and archives yesterday; from the library I found a very helpful pamphlet published by the Masons to tell their members about their new Lansing lodge in 1924; I did not find (although the catalog said it was on the shelf) another publication about the very involved cornerstone ceremony. Also, they didn't have their circulating copy of the first document, but I made a copy.

I went next to the archives, and despite the concentrated efforts of two archivists we found very little of use. The assessor card was missing in action; all the photographs were of the exterior of the structure. My next move (so both places told me) will be the Capital Area District Library's local collection on tuesday. It may be my last hope for more documentation on the temple.

The Run-Around

Last thursday I went to the Cooley Law School to see if they had anything on their Temple building. The temple building sent me to the Cooley center, who sent me upstairs to the Communication department, (most of whom were missing) and they suggested that I check in the library. "There are historical people there who might know."

All I found was a young Grad student Law Librarian, who was very helpful and found a big PDF written by the founder of the school, which mentions the acquisition of the building. However, she didn't know where to find any documentation or who else to talk to about it.

We found a couple citations at the Library of Michigan (who I thought I already asked about this...) so I'll go there today.

Engineering Reports

On Thursday Kelly and I went to the Library of Michigan once again, this time to retrieve the fabled MDOT engineering reports. It's possible that they will be the most useful resource yet unearthed for the planning and development section of the project.
They have many graphs and charts, they talk about an alternate route, they have maps, and they have huge blue and white aerial photogaphs of the target areas with road plans drawn on them. I don't know if I'm comfortable scanning them, so I think I'm going to hand them off to Dr. K on tuesday.

Unfortunately, it seems that we only have two of the three engineering reports, (1588, and 1588 supplement 2) while supplement one has yet to turn up. It seems that our neighborhood might be specifically covered in this missing volume, but the information in these two reports should still prove to be invaluable.

Invasion of the Library of Michigan

We got a lot done today. A whole bunch of us went to the library today, and I met with Bernadette when we arrived. She had a huge stack of citations that she thought might be useful, and gave us some pointers on how to use the indices of the Michigan Legislature records.
For about three and a half hours we scoured the library for the books and documents that we brought citations for, or that Bernadette dug up, and we recorded our findings on a big Word document that Christina will be posting. We then checked out the sources we needed to review further and got out of dodge.
We found probably the majority of state published documents concerning the highway from that era.
Bernadette had some trouble with the MDOT library loaning the plans, but she expects them to come in early next week, so I'll run in then to take a look at what she was able to snag.
Overall, very productive today.

Progress!

I talked to Bernadette Bartlett from the Michigan library yesterday, and she was EXTREMELY helpful. She was able to contact the MDOT library, which is not accessible without an appointment. She found a couple documents that we will definitely need (in addition to a number we might) and will be using interlibrary loan to bring them to the MHC so she can duplicate them, and so we can use them at will. She wants some additional citations in order to have better search criteria to find other documents at the MDOT library. I've posted the full email on the wiki, on a new page, which can be temporary if it's a problem but I didn't know where else to put it.

Basically we need to wait for those documents to get to the Michigan library and email her any other titles we can scrounge up.