Shane Voci's Course Blog

Not sure if we were suppose to post our final research contract but figured may as well seeing our other students did.

 

Shane Voci and Anthony Corbett

Research Proposal – COPLAC Conflict in America

Professor Wallace and Professor Welch

September 28, 2017

Title:

The Rebellion to End all Rebellions: How Shay’s Rebellion changed the U.S. Government’s Response to Armed 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 substance 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.

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.

The front and center of the website should be the “narrative” of history on what happened with the Rebellion. That is history presented in an almost story like telling. But not without proper sources, citations and in context photographs. This will help draw people in to the site and help inform most people who do not know anything about the rebellion. The other tabs on the information will include in-depth look at primary sources and finally what could be a thesis of a paper an entire page of how the rebellion itself effected our early nation’s government, including the constitution and the forming the executive branch of the government. This ties the entire website together and brings in the conflict resolution, displaying the logical but ultimate failings of the new American government to prevent and more violent uprisings.

The overlook of the website we’d like to reflect the area of Massachusetts and the period of the rebellion. Background images that invoke the feeling of a forested area and old parchment. But also among other pictures of places and people from the event, such as Daniel

Shays and Luke Day but also period information such as pictures of newspapers printing the news of the rebellion, such as the New Hampshire Gazette.

The overall goal of the project is to be inviting but professional looking. With an easy to intake narrative with finally a conclusion on how Shays’ Rebellion starts as one of our new governments failed attempts on peacefully preventing future conflict in America.

Technical Details:

A lot of pictures and words, but in a more digestive manner than a twenty-page history paper. 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. 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 not used to reading long paragraphs about people who died a couple hundred years ago. Inserting news articles, if possible, into the website, that are properly cited, so viewers can read primary sources. The technical parts of the website, the meat and potatoes of it, will develop more as the website begins to take shape. To see how everything flows and moves, to see what else can be added and taken away, is much easier when there is a physical object to work on.

Milestone #1 – October 12

September 30 to October 1 –

· Shane Plans to Visit the Springfield Armory

· Tony Plans to visit Sheffield, MA

October 2 to 6 –

· Spend time together to work on pooling information

o Using online databases, information gathered from Springfield and Sheffield, books, articles, etc.

o Remember to use the North Adams Library at this time

October 9 to 11 –

· Get all useful information together and hit the goal for Milestone #1

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

October 13 to 18 –

· Begin write-ups for website

· Plan to have write-ups done before fine tuning them into easy to access timelines and maps for those who find reading to be shallow and pedantic

October 19 to 25 –

· Use write-ups to build timelines and maps

· Take turns building each to get a good feel for the programs

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

October 26 to 1 –

· Begin building the website

· Lots of hands on, working together

· Building the pages, tabs, background images. Make it appealing for people to look at

· Put in all of our hard work!

November 2 to 8 –

· Spend these last few days spell-checking one last time, making sure everything looks good, all the meshes mesh properly.

o Make sure all aspects work properly, page loads properly, etc.

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

November 10 to 29 –

· Get really nitpicky about the website. Make it absolutely perfect. Make it something you definitely want to bring home to momma

· Get feedback from peers and teachers

· Get feedback from friends and relatives

· Throw out most of this feedback, what do they know?

· Really polish it up and get ready to…

This week doing anything on the website was put to a bit of a standstill for me as my internet at my place has been down. With my job it’s hard for me to dedicate a whole lot of time on campus, I tend to be a nightowl to get my assignments and work done. So I focused hard on our first milestone and getting a bunch of research done. I’ve read through three books, secondary resources this week, they’re all tabbed at home so I can’t really go into detail about titles and authors, other than they all have “shays’s rebellion” in them. One I remember pretty well was by Browne, had a whole section on how the Rebellion contributed to state building, really neat stuff.

They’ve all been really good at recounting the facts and interpretation of the facts around the rebellion but many of our resources stop short of what the ripple effect the rebellion had into our constitution or remain nebulous about how much it contributed and to what. So will probably go through another book or two before Thursday.

This week was a bit crazy for me. Had two other rather big assignments in my other classes. I did however, managed to play with Anthony and my site to see if I could recreate what I learned. And I’m proud to say I’ve figured out how to do menus, and drop down lists off those menus to take people to different pages. I consider this a victory with how technologically illiterate I can be with this stuff. The other proportion of this week I dedicated to this class was with Anthony and figuring out how to clean up or research plan and better plan our work out between each other.

 

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.

Hello, in the first week of class I started to look into local history of my immediate area, I thought it would be neat if I could find something very local. Adams/North Adams has a long history here, Adams is the birthplace of Susan B. Anthony. So it should be ripe for conflict history.

What I looked at this week was some of the history of the local mills, the Berkshire Cotton Manufacturing Company had child laborers and the such. So I figured it would be a good place to possibly dig up some conflict in it’s past. But the only thing I really came across other then general history is apparently during King George’s War, North Adams was a fort that came under siege (we lost). Not very helpful, but neat. Will continue to purse local history for awhile, but if it doesn’t pan out might have to pull back into a wider scope.