Thinking about the Fall Semester

Dear History 450 Students

The truth is, I am full of doubts.

In the early summer, I requested that the university give us a classroom to meet in during the fall semester. I was (and am) excited to debut History 450 in its new form, in partnership with the Milwaukee Public Museum. I felt some optimism that Wisconsin’s infections would fall. I had never taught online, and I had some anxiety about whether what I could offer online would rise to the level of quality I expect from my face-to-face classes. Asking the university for a classroom was the only way to keep open the options for the planned in-person experiences, including behind-the-scenes professional development opportunities with MPM staff.

Now, with just over two weeks before we are scheduled to start meeting, my feelings are in constant flux and pulled in different directions. I have spent most of the summer studying how to teach online and building our course, and I am now confident that I can offer you a strong course experience through Canvas. The university has given us a classroom with an adjusted, socially-distant capacity of 30 people, half again as much space as the minimum we require with twenty students registered for the class. Since the introduction of mask mandates in July, Milwaukee County’s numbers have fallen sharply. Wisconsin’s numbers are in a slow decline, or perhaps steady. Several Ivy League universities abandoned their plans for undergraduate in-person education before the semester started. Yesterday, a week after starting the semester in person, the University of North Carolina abruptly shifted all of its undergraduate classes online after four separate clusters of cases emerged. I am full of doubts and questions, but I also have a strand of hope pulling me forward: working with you.

My plan for History 450 has some important flexibilities built in.

First, I have made the entire course available through Canvas so that you never have to come to our classroom if you do not want to. If your best rational judgment or your gut-level instincts tell you to stay away; if you are ill or quarantined or caring for someone who is sick or immune-compromised; if you have to supervise children whose schools are operating virtually; if you have recently been in a situation where you might have been exposed, such as a party or a work environment; or if something happens and there isn’t time to check with me—just do the work for the week as indicated on Canvas. You don’t have to ask to be excused; just show up in the online spaces instead of in person.

Relatedly, at any time we can also decide as a class that we would prefer to operate virtually instead of in-person. We can decide this on a week-to-week basis. We can decide to spend part of the semester operating remotely and then come back to our classroom later when things look better. We can decide to do most of our work online and then come together only for the live Twitter reenactment on November 5. You can decide individually, and we can also decide together.

Additionally, the course is ungraded instead of graded. That means that you are in charge of deciding what each assignment is worth to you in terms of time and effort. I will give you feedback, but you will assess your own work. At the end of the semester you will tell me what grade you think you earned and will show up on your transcript. My hope is that the ungrading approach will reduce the pressure on you to perform and increase your learning and the fun we can have as a class, even in these anxious times.

Two weeks from now, my feelings might not be the same as they are today. And there are twenty of you—you surely all have different hopes, fears, and expectations for the fall semester. And, like mine, they are probably constantly changing.

Please feel free to reach out to me and let me know how you are feeling about how our class should operate. This class foregrounds two skills: collaboration and communication. Both start with honesty and are embedded in relationships. I want to know what you think we should do.

This pandemic is unprecedented for all of us. This is our class. We are in this together.

Sincerely (truly),

 

Amanda

What Is a Live Twitter Reenactment, Anyway?

In 2019, Jaclyn Kelly, an educator from the Milwaukee Public Museum came to me in search of a permanent course partner for a project that she had been running since 2015. In a series of four live Twitter reenactments of historical Milwaukee events, students and other volunteers had used words, images, and hashtags in a coordinated set of tweets to re-create standout moments of local history as if they were happening in the present. Together they told the stories of the 1892 Third Ward Fire (2015), Milwaukee’s Ice Wars (2016), the 1939 Green Bay Packers championship game against Giants (2017), and the 1940 Armistice Day storm (2018). By the time Ms. Kelly left my office, partnering with MPM on the annual reenactment had become the core of my vision to revive History 450, UWM’s class on the history of the Milwaukee area.

What is a live Twitter reenactment, you ask? Even people who are not professional historians are fascinated by history. Adult Americans willingly use their leisure time to absorb history through relatively passive means—in the form of memoirs and biographies, books about history written by professional and amateur historians, in movies and TV shows. They also take part in more active approaches to exercising their historical imaginations by immersing themselves in recreated historical contexts: they attend Renaissance Fairs, visit living history museums such as Colonial Williamsburg and Old World Wisconsin, and participate in cosplay and live reenactments of Civil War battles. A live Twitter reenactment brings the elements of historical reenactment to the fast-moving microblog platform. Participating educates both those who put it on and those who read the tweets.

In a live Twitter reenactment, participants reconstruct a specific historical event on Twitter, from the point of view of actual and composite historical “characters” who did (or might have) participated in it or observed it as it was occurring. Before they start, reenactors research the event and their specific characters, draft and revise Tweets from their character’s point of view, and sequence their release with the whole group. Finally, during the designated live-tweeting period, participants release their tweets to the world, in the pre-planned order, in one sitting. They can also make their reconstruction of the past more vivid Twitter enhancers such as @tags, hashtags, images, and links.

As the American Historical Association is constantly reminding us, everything has a history—including Twitter reenactments. As far as I have been able to learn, the idea of the Twitter reenactment originated with a group of graduate students at Utah State University led by Marion Jensen. They developed a practice and a website called Twhistory, which they described in a short open access 2010 article. Brian A. McKenzie, of the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, published a longer article in The History Teacher about how his class reenacted the Battle of Stalingrad and the Paris Commune in 2012. A crucial refinement of McKenzie’s reenactment included posting Tweets with a shared hashtag such as #stalinsim[1] that allowed the Twitterverse to watch the reenactment unfold and to search for it later. McKenzie writes that he “encouraged students to think of [their] tweets as roughly falling into one of three categories: direct, first-hand tweets—for example a Communard tweeting about the fall of Courbevoie; indirect, second-hand tweets, such as Zhukhov tweeting about the capture of a factor; and ‘ideational’ tweets illustrating inferred expectations, attitudes and opinions.”[2]

Several history instructors in Midwestern US universities have also incorporated Twitter reenactments into their curricula. Reenactors at the University of  Kansas recreated the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, while a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay centered local history with a reenactment at the Green Bay Fire of 1880. Residents of Lawrence, Kansas (home of the University of Kansas) used the public library to reenact Quantrill’s Raid from US Civil War. Alwyn Collinson, a one-person Twitter reenactor based in the United Kingdom, tweets to more than half a million followers from @RealTimeWWII. As you might expect from the handle, Collinson’s goal is to “livetweet the Second World War as it happened on this date in 1942 & for 4 years to come (2nd time around).”

At the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where History 450 will re-debut in fall 2020, the collaboration with the Milwaukee Public Museum uses three main criteria for choosing topics. The ideal focus event 1) relates in some way to the STEM fields, which is an important MPM education area; 2) allows us to showcase archival collections held at UWM; and 3) is somehow related to the history of the Milwaukee area.

For our inaugural event, we have selected the first official weather forecast in the United States, which was issued by Wisconsin naturalist Increase Lapham on November 8, 1870. Since 2020 marks the 150^th anniversary of that forecast, it seemed like the perfect kick-off event for History 450. On Thursday, November 5, 2020, the class will release our Twitter reenactment (hopefully from inside the Public Museum, depending on the state of the pandemic). Please follow our work and the reenactment itself with the hashtag #mke70. If you can’t wait until November to know what the weather will be like, Increase Lapham’s 1870 forecast is available here, on the website of the Wisconsin Historical Society.

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[1] Clearly #stalinsim is short for “Stalin simulation,” but it also appears to be a frequent misspelling of “Stalinism.”

[2] Brian A. McKenzie, “Teaching Twitter: Re-enacting the Paris Commune and the Battle of Stalingrad.” The History Teacher 47 (3) (2014): 355-372.

Introduction to History 450

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.