Month: September 2017

 

Milestone #1 – October 12

Have all information on Shay’s Rebellion gathered and have sorted through it all. At this point we should have no need to go to the Springfield Armory or anywhere else. We should have all of our information, secondary and primary. We should know what we have, what goes together, and begin thinking about the layout of the website. After this point it should be more technical and aesthetic based work on the project.

 

Milestone #2 – October 26

Have a basic layout of the website constructed. Have all if not most of the aspects; timelines, images and write-ups all done. By this date we should not be sitting down to write anything or be building any timelines, or looking for images. Being history majors we are pretty good at writing things and pretty alright at doing timelines so this is where we put our noses to the grindstone in order finish a blueprint of the website to work off of. What goes where, how many pages/tabs, what the pages/tabs are, where do the images go, etc.  

 

Milestone #3 – November 9

Have the website designed and begin inserting the aspects. This point should see no more write-ups being done, especially no more information gathering. This is where we begin to “copy and paste” (for lack of a better term) the parts of the website together. Putting in the write-ups, timelines, images, etc. Making final changes to the project. We should have a pretty finished website by this point so then the following weeks we can be very nitpicky about it.   

 

Final Project Due – November 30

Turn in the final project and really “wow” the competition.

This week I really thought a lot about how to format the website more than anything. I really do not want to it come across as a boring fact based listing of events. Last semester I did a paper on the Battle of Trafalgar and one of the secondary sources I used was The Pursuit of Victory: The Life and Achievement of Horatio Nelson by Roger Knight. The way it was written was in a an narrative, almost as if it was itself a work of fiction. Of course it wasn’t and it included primary sources within the text, but it just made the whole 900 pages easier to digest and made me want to read the next section. So I am looking to set up our website in kinda the same way, Nelson’s life really set it self up to be this narrative (spoiler: he dies at Trafalgar to save the English from the threat of Napoleon, after becoming an English war hero) but I feel so does are rebellion in a way. Something I will continue to look over and discussing it with Anthony.

 

The other thing I did was starting to go over word press with a tech friend I have. I know we have a tech department at our schools, but one of my best friends does this thing as a living so I’m much more comfortable having him show me the ropes. He  also knows me well enough to articulate instructions in a manner I’ll actually understand. This also leaves me the option to text him at 3 in the morning when something inevitably goes wrong.

Project Proposal – COPLAC Conflict in America

Professor Wallace and Professor Welch

September 16, 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.

Not going to lie here, this week wasn’t very productive for me. I caught a cold from a co-work and have been hamstrung the past few days. I’ve really only wanted to sleep and watch some comfort movies. I started reading one of my secondary sources and I organized some of the primary source articles into groups based on the information I think they’re giving me, (the conflict history, resolution, failed resolution, etc.) but that is about it. Hopefully the cold will pass quickly.

This week most of my headway was with the Springfield Armory where I able to gather a bunch of links from them that were of Massachusetts newspapers and other primary sources with Shays’ Rebellion it is a trove of information for the event and will take a bit longer to filter through it all.  As far as the IRB contact goes, at this point I really don’t think we’ll need it. I already got a nice chunk of primary and secondary sources, I mean it’s always possible that we talk to a historian who says something so grand we have to quote them, but at this point I still haven’t talked to IRB. The only other thing I can really talk about is the time line I did, it really took me awhile to figure out how to do everything (even with the help in class, I blame my goldfish memory). I’ve tried a few times to embed it properly but cannot for the life of me figure out how to do that properly on this blog post, so I guess a link it is.

https://cdn.knightlab.com/libs/timeline3/latest/embed/index.html?source=1foNfWsGvBRLx118eZ3Qixn75xFIFHBPvACGv8v8JyJM&font=Default&lang=en&initial_zoom=2&height=650

References:

Beeman, Richard, Stephen Botein, , and Edward C. Carter. Beyond Confederation : Origins of the Constitution and American National Identity. North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 1987.

Parker, Rachel R. “Shays’ Rebellion: An Episode in American State-Making.” Sociological Perspectives 34, no. 1 (1991): 95-113. JSTOR. Accessed September 7, 2017.

Pencak, William. “Samuel Adams and Shays’s Rebellion.” The New England Quarterly 62, no. 1 (1989): 63-74. JSTOR. Accessed September 7, 2017.

Pencak, William A., , John Lax, , and Ralph J. Crandall. Contested Commonwealths : Essays in American History. Pennsylvania: Lehigh University Press, 2011.

Szatmary, David P. Shays’ Rebellion: the making of an agrarian insurrection. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980.

 

Well me and Anthony started are look into Shay’s Rebellion. Anthony talked to our librarian as he’s on campus, classes don’t start here yet till next week so I still haven’t set foot on campus. From my understanding the meet with Tony and librarian didn’t yield to much, we do not have old documents at our school and she directed us to look else where such as the Commonwealth Catalog. That being said, I have not been idle.

I have two plans of gathering research for this topic. One is just doing the standard history gathering practice, I am a senior history major and this is pretty regular for me. I went through JSTOR and our library’s online catalog and already through that gotten some pretty good results. I’ve found an article through The American Historical Review that literally is just primary sources of letters between the governor and his generals that stopped the Rebellion. I’ve found two helpful monographs, one that discusses Shays’ Rebellion and it’s relation to state formation and another on how Shay’s Rebellion influenced federalists and antifederalists as they were discussing constitutional reform. In this same vein I found an article that takes a sociological view at the Rebellion and the effect it had on state-making.

The second plan, is more outside of what I usually do, contacting people. I went to our local museum this week and talked to a curator, who was very friendly and was willing to dig up the information that the historical society had in direct local history to the Rebellion. He emailed me a rather short (like six pages) word document that was cited and read like someone’s notes going through old North Adams documents, it mentions a few local people by name and their relation to the rebellion. As well as a few notes by the museum staff themselves when they are not sure if a bit of information provided is reliable. It’s pretty neat. I have also learned the Springfield armory, where the failed rebellion started, is now a museum. I’ve been meaning to call them but my work schedule been making this pretty hard. Plan on doing this Monday, to see if I get anything neat like I did from the North Adams Museum, might take a psychical trip out to the museum this week too. I think Anthony is looking into Sheffield, where the rebellion was put down. I’ve also been looking through the search engines that our library suggested, mainly the commonwealth catalog but it hasn’t borne anything that amazing.

At this point, I already have a bunch of information to review over and delegate with Anthony with. I would like more local documentation, hopefully when I do contact the Springfield Armory Museum they will be able to point me at some good stuff.