Post #4

Project Proposal – COPLAC Conflict in America

Professor Wallace and Professor Welch

September 21, 2017

Title:

The Rebellion to End all Rebellions

Mission/Goal of Project:

Shays’ Rebellion may be one of the most famous, or infamous, rebellions in the history of the United States. Taking place in central and western Massachusetts and lasting only several months from 1787 until 1788, it claimed no more than a few dozen lives on both sides. However, it changed the way the U.S. government would function. It brought up questions of rebellion and how the U.S. government would, or could, handle them especially when they turned violent. The resolution to the rebellion was violence, despite a few legislative actions trying in vain to end the rebellion in peace. Putting down the rebels seemed to be the only solution many leaders came to and this solution brings up questions of how to deal with rebellions, and even protests. It begs the question of how should the U.S. government deal with these problems in present day America? Should we use violence or can they be settled in a more peaceful manner? Did the changes to the US government brought on by Shays’ Rebellion truly benefit in ending future rebellions peacefully?

For starters, many people today are not sure what Shays’ Rebellion even is so the opening page for our site should have its own “who, what, when, where, why and how.” This gives the reader/viewer a background before they delve into the real meat and potatoes of the event. Off of the main page are several tabs which describe different stages in the event; the forming of the rebellion, Shays’ assault on the Springfield Armory, The Battle of Sheffield, just to name a few. Off of these pages there is a general description of what happened at the specific instance, will be more in depth information about people, places, and what sort of effects the events had.

Technical Details:

A lot of pictures and words. That is the general technical theme of any historian when trying to figure out this grand world of websites and how they should look. We plan on making use of photos of places with historical meaning, all of these important places are within driving distance for the two of us. We are both confident that our background as history majors will lend to properly laying the information we have found into proper context. Additionally, unless you know central and western Massachusetts, you’ll most likely have no idea where any of this is taking place so we intend to use the google maps to make it easy to follow where the events take place. Timelines are a perfect way to show off pictures and tidbits of information for those of us who are less adapted to reading long paragraphs about people who died a couple hundred years ago. It is very important that people know where and when this event took place. The area is very interesting and how it all unfolded was heavily impacted by the economic and social implications of the time; the number of poor rural farmers and military veterans who lived in the Massachusetts at the time was insurmountable. At this time, all the newspaper articles have been digitally transferred. With no pictures of the actual documents, we are looking into possibly finding the original copies of these papers. With the possible absence of these documents, photographs of them will only help to enhance the experience on our website.

We are going to try to lead away from the typical history website where everything comes across as dull, like you are reading a textbook. We would like to present this information as a narrative and not a website where the facts are just spewed back out and a conclusion is drawn. We would like to keep the attention of the reader by keeping the website in a narrative form that drops in primary resources we think would help immerse the read fully in our topic.