Welcome to the first blog post for History 450. This companion blog documents the course "The Growth of Metropolitan Milwaukee," a course I will be teaching at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee for the first time in fall 2020, and, I hope, every fall semester until I retire.
This course is a research-intensive class in which the students' assignments are public-facing. They will write blog posts, curate primary sources, interact with members of the public, and engage in a live Twitter reenactment of a historical event connected to the history of Milwaukee. Every year the course has a different theme as its research focus. In fall 2020, the theme is the first official weather report in United States history, issued by Increase Lapham in November 1870. (If you can't wait for the Twitter reenactment to find out what the forecast was, you can view a facsimile of the original report on the Wisconsin Historical Society's digital archives).
This course benefits from the work of several institutional partners. The idea for the course originated in the live Twitter reenactment, which the Milwaukee Public Museum's Education Department developed and put on for several years. I have partnered with MPM in designing the course;s professional development activities, which include multiple opportunities for students to visit with museum staff. In addition, this course is sponsored UWM's Office of Undergraduate Research, which offers several Course-Based Research Projects every year. Finally, teaching students about how to do historical research would be impossible without the archivists and librarians who staff the UWM Libraries.
In future posts, I'll have much more to say about the purposes and activities of this class, including why I am "ungrading" instead of using traditional assessment. So stay tuned! In the meantime, if you want to follow the course on Twitter, just search for the hashtag #mke70.
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