IV. Activities

Primary Documents

1. Provide one handwritten document for each student to study. It could be from a public or private collection. The student must be able to answer several basic questions about it:
   • What kind of document is it?
   • Who produced it and for what reason?
   • Was the information written at the time of the event or produced later from memory?
   • Is the author objective in his/her treatment of the facts? Why or why not?
   • Where would you look for any other information to agree or disagree with these facts? Have students discuss their findings and comment on how the document might be used for research.

2. Locate records on a controversial issue in your community that had a larger context. It might be minutes of town meeting or city council meeting on a recent debate over questions of override of proposition 2 1/2, fluoridation in the drinking water, or joining a waste disposal district, for example. Look for other sources (newspaper articles, reports from pro & con groups). Restage the debate and find out what arguments were most persuasive, and how the outcome could have been different.

3. Build upon a packet of documents prepared on the state ratification of the US Constitution in 1788. This was a hotly contested issue and could have gone either way. Write to the Commonwealth Museum for a copy of this packet and add a local component to it. Find records of who your town elected to serve at the convention, how your town meeting instructed the delegate to vote, and what issues were most important to the town.

   Documents are also available on state ratification of the Bill of Rights. The document (above right) was on display at the Commonwealth Museum with other documents related to the debate on ratification by Massachusetts.

4. "Teaching with Documents," a Social Education monthly feature, provides a model for using a historical document, which could be adapted locally. See Curriculum Materials for reference.

5. Census records are invaluable sources for investigating population changes, family structures, immigration and economic patterns. Students can use them in conjunction with old maps to gain a clearer picture of the texture of past life.

   There are usually four sections of data on every town or city recorded: a) head count of households listing ages and occupations of family members and usually their place of birth and race; b) a list of deaths and their causes; c) agricultural production; and d) industrial production. At the end of each section there are totals of categories.

1. Head count with ages and occupations
   Have students look at two or three pages of data. How many families are nuclear (with two adult parents and their children)? One parent? Many relatives?
   • List families by type of work (farming, specific trade, merchant, etc.). Examine the kinds of occupations for men and women. Are they sex-typed? Compare with modern family structure and gender roles.
   • Have students study one family in depth and write a dialog between family members at the dinner table or write a journal by one family member. Additional sources may be needed for period and community background.
   • At the end of the first section the number of families and of household structures can be tallied. Have the students decide what they want to compare in chart form. Usually the families exceed the number of homes. Many homes had only one bedroom. Let the students think what those numbers mean and discuss the question of personal privacy, homelessness, and comparisons with today.
2. Deaths and their causes (second section) can be used along with vital statistics and cemetery records (including a trip to read gravestones). Use several years for examples.(*Note: Be sensitive about different cultural attitudes toward death and entering graveyards.)
   • Have students make a list of the most common reasons for death. How many of them are still found today? (Some old medical terms may need interpretation in current language.) Were these generally chronic illnesses or acute ones? What kinds of epidemics can be noted?
   • What are the percentages of children and adult deaths? Plot numbers for different ages. Were there certain months when the number of deaths rose? Certain years worse than others?
3. -
4. Labor: Agricultural production and industrial production (third and fourth sections) can be used together to give a more complete picture of the economic situation of the community.
   • Which was the dominant activity of town in the period studied? List jobs connected with it (e.g. tanning of leather in a farm community).
   • What farm produce and goods were most common? Compare to local farm produce today. Where does other produce come from?
   • What percentage of the community lived on farms? What size of farms?
   • Make a list of the different types of manufacturing and business for your chosen period. Use a map for this period to locate the trade and manufacturing buildings listed in the census. What is at these locations today?
   • Compare wages earned by male and female employees. The rationale for paying male wage earners more (as much as 3 to 1) was that male workers supported a whole family and women were young and single. How true was this? How much was gender discrimination?
   • From early 1800s to 1870 there were roughly as many women as men employed in industry. Note the steadily declining numbers of women after this date. The census will not give reasons why. Where would you look for information on changing labor practices?

Photographs and Illustrations

1. Portraits by well known portrait painters were not common but were commissioned by wealthy/prominent families in the late 18th-19th century. Itinerant portrait painters, however, traveled around the state. A surprising number of their historical portraits still reside in the community.
   • Find out whose portraits hang in your public library and historical houses. Have students study one or more of these pictures. Who are the subjects and what is their relationship to the town? Who painted them? What does the portrait tell you about the person? The period of time? The artist? What other questions can students frame? Compare two portraits from two different periods and place them in context.

2. Photographs are easier to find than portraits, are apt to provide more information and are often truer to life. Check in your local historical houses and in the repositories listed in the back.
   • Challenge students to observe photographs closely, think critically and answer questions. Depending on the collection available, this primary source can be used in connection with such local study topics as family activities, buildings and architecture, landscape, work patterns and more. The photographs can be used along with other visual sources to verify a place or building, or question written descriptions.
   • Ask older residents of the community to come into the classroom to share their photograph collection to provide a sense of neighborhood, cultural and family traditions. Student family photos can be shared in the same way to help students become their family's historian.
   • Have students take photos of the school neighborhood for a class collection to be passed on to the school. Make a display showing old and new pictures of the same neighborhood. Exhibit class pictures from different periods of time. Tie this in with map studies of other neighborhoods.

3. Landscape and land use illustrations supplement photographs and maps to reveal geography, natural features and settlement patterns.
   • Historical landscape paintings are not common, but there are 19th century painters of village greens, river valleys, and mountains (our first environmental painters?). In areas where industrial development along rivers became a major land use, factories were romanticized in paintings.
   • Postcards came into vogue in the late 1800s and are still around. What scenes of your town were first sold? What is available today? Project one scene for the whole class to observe in detail. See what generalizations they can make from observations. How would they test hypotheses?
   • "Bird's Eye Views" of villages, towns, were popular in the late 1800's. They were part maps, part pictures with a 3-D perspective, and often gave remarkable detail of buildings and features. Use them with earlier and later maps to compare layouts of center, road development, parks and general change in landscape as well as architectural development of neighborhood and walking tours.

4. Other Images
   • Slides can be made of historic photographs, paintings and documents, and an explanatory tape can be prepared (work with the media center?). This can precede a field trip to slide scenes.
   • Old newspapers have cartoons and broadsides containing social commentary as well as drawings that students can analyze.

Maps

1. Map symbols: Brainstorm a list of major items to include on a map of today: e.g., road, railroad, building, school, church, bridge, river, pond, park, hill, and other features the students suggest. Give students time to draw a symbol for each item, then arrive at class agreement on symbols. Compare their results with standard US symbols as shown on a USGS topographic map.

2. Map sources: To begin a community map study, collect them from many local and regional sources. Consult the map resource list. Have students discuss locations to contact for historical, land use, geologic, topographic and special maps such as atlases. To save time, you may want to have a collection ready, but students still need to learn about map sources.

3. Using maps from different time periods, have students trace patterns of land use such as settlement, agriculture, industry, and transportation. See the activity on Lynn maps for a detailed model. Research for the map study can come from a written history, but primary sources such as census and community records, memoirs and illustrations enhance the learning. Other re-creations of the period are possible through role playing, murals or drawings, or creative writing.

4. Have students start on personal mapmaking by drawing their own neighborhood from memory.
   • Ask them to put in what they are familiar with and remember. What kind of neighborhood is it and what is important to them in it? How does a personal map differ from others?
   • Encourage a class discussion and agreement on what every neighborhood map might include (streets, houses and other buildings, walking and play areas, other?). Students follow-up by observing the neighborhood more closely and doing a second map, using agreed upon details. The two maps are then compared in writing by the student. A variation of this activity combines observing a neighborhood closely with identifying home architectural styles.

5. Have groups of students report on different neighborhoods in your community.
   • make maps of streets, buildings, land use;
   • interview residents for background information on past land use;
   • investigate names of some streets around their homes for history and significance.

6. Place Names survey: Look at a street map of your community today. See if there is an alphabetical street index. If not, have groups of students write down names of streets. You may want to divide by neighborhood or along other lines. Groups then research origin of names. If a large town or city, limit the number for each group.
   • When did it become a street and how did it get its name? Has its name changed over time?
   • Look at names of natural features and research their naming.
   • Is there any pattern to the place names of streets? Do names of natural features follow the same pattern or a different one?

7. Assign groups a map theme for one period in community history: Population, economy, natural resources, land use, and transportation (or your own theme). Let groups decide on graphics or symbols. Have groups report and compare results. Is there overlap? Could these maps be combined?
   • Follow up with research into ways these themes are shown on maps today to allow them to make a second map. How are population statistics shown? How are towns compared in population density, land use on state, national maps? How do charts and bar graphs relate to maps ? Look up the Massachusetts Historical Atlas.
   • Arrange for field trips to US Geological Survey or state census, planning/environmental offices, or invite experts into the classroom.

8. Plan a trip 100 (or 200, 300) years ago. It might be from Boston to Springfield (or variations to include your town or city). Make a map and mark the route. Compare with a map of today.
   For older map, pick a date that ties in with your ongoing history studies that also provides major comparisons with today.
   Find old maps and histories (town, county, state). Local records on roads give insight into early roadbuilding. For later period, photographs and postcards are helpful. See references.
   • Are routes the same?
   • What are modes of transportation?
   • How much time for each trip?
   • What are problems/dangers of travel in each period? Benefits?
   • What services are available along the way?
   • How were roads built in each period and who built them?
   • Where were new towns created?
   • Did invention of new modes of transportation affect towns along route(s)?
   • How have changes in transportation affected your community?
   Start with the map of today if this provides greater motivation.

   The Massachusetts Historical Atlas: This volume on political and cultural history, recently published by the University of Massachusetts Press, is richly filled with maps, pictures, graphs and lively text. A committee formed to promote Massachusetts studies in the classroom is encouraging its wide dissemination and the publication of a second volume (physical and cultural atlas deferred because of budget cuts). The committee also aims to identify and provide supplementary materials to make the Atlas information more usable by teachers. The authors, Prof. Richard W. Wilkie of the Geography Department and Prof. Jack Tager of the History Department of University of Massachusetts at Amherst say in their Preface:

   "The historical relationship between the natural physical setting and the built environment is the subject of this volume. It. requires the marriage of two disciplines, geography and history, both of which involve the study of change over time. Mountains erode and vanish, settlements grow or disappear, routes and boundaries are redrawn. Our purpose is to put these changes in context by introducing people to the history of Massachusetts in its geographic setting.

   Our effort is a response to the lament, so often heard... that our children have lost interest in the world in which they live, that they know nothing about who they are or where they come from, that they can't find their home state on a map."

   In this volume the authors bring together local data in a statistical summary covering political, economic, population, and geography information. Two map transparencies are included to assist in locating cities and towns on Atlas maps.

   Local studies are part of the larger state picture and sense of place and awareness of time are the main goals of both. For example, many of the activities in this Source-book could be keyed to pages of this Atlas that pertain to local studies. Many other local curriculum materials for different disciplines could tie into the Atlas.

   Material Culture/Built Environment

   Material culture can include everything from buildings, artifacts, cemetery gravestones and backyard privies to old lilac plantings (non-native plants often planted by a doorstep). In this broad cultural history search, architecture and archeology skills and many other disciplines help establish a context for the objects or evidence found.
   1. Houses of "treasures": Good places to find material culture are the historical house and museum. Visit these important repositories for artifacts Ñ man-made objects from the built environment or uncovered in "digs." Many of them have guided tours and treasure hunts to help identify the material culture. Next have the class focus on artifacts of a specific period or topic.

   2. The built environment: The town/city can be considered a museum in itself. Study its buildings statues, parks, open spaces for designs, histories and "place." Look at one block in detail.

   3. Architectural history : Make an inventory of historic houses: develop a listing by street and describe buildings in terms of architecture and place in community history. Have students:
      • Prepare a walking tour to oldest area(s). Individual buildings/spaces become special projects.
      • Inventory the community landmark structures and sculptures and discuss relevance as symbols and reminders of community history. They design a structure or sculpture for the school ground, playground and explain why appropriate.

   4. Examine the school building in detail. Find site study, architectural and building plans. Have officer from planning officer or building inspector speak to students about local procedures. Have an architect explain how to read an architectural plan. Locate sewage, water, power and heating systems. Have students make drawings and write up a guided tour to your school building/systems.

   5. Class Design Project: Preservation Worcester collaborates with area architects and the public schools in Worcester to bring architects into classrooms to help students think about design by observing plans. Students then draw designs in class and select a design that is easy enough to replicate. This project is especially helpful when art programs have been phased out or curtailed.

   6. Tools over Time: Look in the Yellow Pages of your local phone book for antique dealers, second hand dealers and junk dealers where old tools and gadgets might be found. See if the library has old catalogs (Sears e.g.) that might show the kind of tools and objects students are seeking. A search for tools of an earlier culture (select a period that assures success) can lead to a better understanding of its material culture and to some investigations into the family attic or "grandma's trunk.";

   7. Study an object from today, like a kitchen tool, pocket calculator, etc. Groups handle tool and record facts using all the senses (color, texture). How made? How used (practical and decorative uses)? What place in today's culture?
      Study an object from 100 years ago (could be from catalog above or tie into a trip to historical house). How much can be guessed from using the senses? from inferring from modern tools? How can inferences be checked out?

   8. Time Capsule: Have class think up objects to bury in a capsule that represent their culture. What would these objects tell people 100 years from now about the world of students today?

   9. Cemeteries: compare gravestones for different periods: kind of stone, motif, location in cemetery; do census studies to compare one period with today -ages at death, causes of death; look into burial practices and relation to community laws, standards. Make drawings and rubbings.

   10. Archeological History: Find out about past or ongoing "digs"; in your community, where sites are located, what has been excavated and where artifacts are analyzed and stored. What is the oldest evidence of human activity found? Who were the first people? What peoples came after them? Locate nearest Archaeological Society and see reference list. See also landscape ideas.

   Landscape/Environment:

   The cultural history of a community in the broad sense can be seen by "reading" the physical and natural landscape as well as the built environment. Changes in the land can be revealed through the environmental and landscape history of the place.
   1. Pick one site (town or city center, mill site, etc.) and find out its landscape or environmental history. Consult all maps and historical documents that cover this piece of land. Students can decide what to look for in the field before going out to search for clues. Invite experts (geologists, geographers, archeologists) to prepare them in the classroom or in the field on historical indicators or evidence.

   2. Discover connections from this small site to a larger environment. If there are rock outcrops, let them look for similar features in the surrounding area. Students can learn where else this bedrock appears by studying geologic maps which cover the community.

   3. Take soil samples from the small site and do soil testing in class with soil kits from County Extension Service. Locate soil maps for your community and region. How do soil types vary from place to place? Relate types to land use. Soil type as well as natural features can determine whether land was/is used for farming, business and industry or residences. If the most fertile land is not used for farming, nor the marginal land for business, what other factors determine land use?

   4. Connect the small site to the larger unit of study to ask how geography affected culture. Based on knowledge of reading the landscape from small site study, have groups analyze the entire community development in relation to the land. List main natural features and main human development of the land. Groups try to reason or infer why human activities affected the land and vice versa. Which came first and why?

   5. Pick a watershed as a larger unit to study. Understand how your community streams (mill sites, for example) relate to a watershed. Where did water come from and where does it go? What feeds into it? Making a relief map helps in relating topography to the watershed picture.
      Natural boundaries are different from political boundaries like towns, cities and states. How are the environmental connections helpful to the political unit and how do they make planning difficult? Find out how local decisions are made that relate to watershed planning.

   6. Look at Native American settlement patterns in relation to landscape and environment: Build upon a study of your watershed and its resources to understand first settlements by Native Peoples. Consult the Historical Atlas of Massachusetts.
      • After looking at the natural features and resources, have students assess the best locations for living sites, hunting, fishing, gathering plants, and other necessary activities for survival; and obstacles and problems to avoid.
      • Tie into an archeology study to learn about early sites along the rivers. Make connections between locations for particular activities for survival. Correlate with student assessments.
      • Many related disciplines help archeologists understand settlement patterns. Find out how material remaining under the ground can tell how people lived. What methods are used by paleo-botanists to analyze plant remains and zooarch-eologists to identify animal remains? How do geologists and soil scientists assist in the field?