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