4/16/03 - end of course tie-together, dealing with the content of the various presentations, rather than with the very important pedagogical aspects of the course.

 

My purpose is linking course presentations; it is a simplified summary (don’t all summaries tend to simplify?) and is more a skeleton for you to flesh out with your notes and with the material on the MSP home page.

 

Remember my bias and the theme of the course.  First: Geography as the study of what phenomena are in what places, the study of why they are in those places (and not in other places), and the study of the consequences of those locational facts.  Second: the importance of Place in Massachusetts history; that is - the inextricable relation of events (history) and location (place/ geography)

 

The course started with people, and we are, after all, both the actors and the interpreters in the present and the past.  Eric Johnson spoke of who was here when history began in what is now Massachusetts, and how those people interacted with the landscape, Westy Egmont then spoke about those who came next and how that interaction changed, and then we wound up with more “invasive” interactions with the landscape, as Jack Looney presented transportation aspects.  Note that roads and bridges, harbors, buildings, community plans, for instance, are all built on or into the landscape as it exists at particular times - and in so doing, make new landscapes.

 

Again, remember that a theme of the course for you as teachers has been to tie your material to you own communities, even though some of the presentations gave a statewide or economy-wide view.

 

The latter was evident with Dick Gelkpe’s material.   That dealt with the physical framework of the state as whole; the “clay’ so to speak, from which human potters shaped and are still shaping the containers of our culture.

 

Those containers are communities and Mike Steinitz spoke of the molding of villages, towns, and cities and spoke of the transient nature of the very containers.  Sometimes we can see (or work out) what that looked like and what its influence was on our behavior - and some times the evidence is lost.  You are called on to be detectives in many instances.  By the way, it is remarkable how often “PLACE” is central to detective stories.

 

Larry Gross began your study of the economic shift from rural to urban landscapes in a particular location (Lowell), one in which the characteristics of the place were greatly changed by humans during, and because of, and in order to make, that shift.   It is an interesting  “chicken and egg” puzzle.

 

Len Travers worked from a different place (New Bedford) and showed a different resulting  industry, though much of the underlying economic principle was the same: free enterprise with remarkable few societal controls.  Place was important in producing the differences, but human nature produced the similarities of inequities.

 

Sheila Kirschbaum took that approach further with her study of change in industrialized Lowell, using it as a example of the changes that the developing economy was producing across the state and country. One could examine how much the underlying social forces have been shaped by the differing localities through their traditions and even, dare I say, by place.   One can’t always operate the same type of mills in the same way in different landscapes and social communities.  Resources, both human and physical, vary from place to place.

 

Next, Kathryn Grover presented a narrow, but exemplary look at one group of people in one particular place, New Bedford.  That African-American community (a relatively new term -and to my fascination, yesterday, I talked with a highly educated and skilled African-American who did not know the older term, “African diaspora”) was in New Bedford because of the characteristics (both physical and human) of that particular place and the employment of that ethnic group was largely shaped by those locational factors.

 

Now we are back to Jack Looney’s presentation, with what is a more familiar, perhaps, set of scenery, but scenery which we often take for granted, without seeing the interactions of people and landscape - that very interaction which typifies the importance of Place in History.

 

Reed F. Stewart