The hospitality was great when I took a gang of students to Ashley last spring to pilot the first cloud-cataloging project in a local museum in North Dakota. Our main hosts were Marvel Gross and Randy Woehl of the McIntosh County Heritage Center, which has fabulous collections. The Ashley Lions Club and the McIntosh County Bank were generous in financial support, enabling us to eat well and to lodge in a fascinating heritage establishment, the Ashley Lodge. We enjoyed meals at the Prairie Rose, breakfasted on those great sausage sandwiches from Ashley SuperValu, and had unlimited supplies of kuchen, courtesy of Grandma’s Kuchen.
The transforming experience began not long after we departed Fargo, for most of the students were Minnesotans who had never been west of I29. For a while they reckoned we were about to fall off the edge of the earth. They perked up when we climbed onto the Coteau, and then marveled as we entered a snowglobe of migrating geese.
The truly transformative experience was the encounter with the artifacts at the Mac. The literature on Generation Z says that Zoomers, first of all, are comfortable with matters digital, which was important; we came to the heritage center to enter its collections into a digital system. Zoomers also, and I know it seems discrepant, they are taken with tangible things. Fortune magazine says the reason they like music on vinyl is they are drawn to “all things touchable.” And here they were, encouraged to pick things up, hundreds of things, examine them, get to know them, figure them out. The match of the task at hand with generational aptitudes, I think, was what made the project a success. No one predicted how readily the students would engage the artifacts.
Now I am doing data cleanup, making their notes into a functional catalog, and realizing that expression in writing, however, is not my students’ strong suit. As I think about this, I happen to be reading an old classic in the practice of everyday history, the 1982 book called Nearby History, by Kyvig and Marty. This is helpful.
For the past generation we have been trying to expand the menu of learning, to embrace the graphic and the aural and the interactive. Perhaps we have neglected written expression. I don’t mean anything so prosaic as so-called “communication skills.” I mean the ability to engage, compose, make sense, and put things into words — to tell a story.
When I say this, remember I speak as a self-conscious person of letters, but Kyvig and Marty confirm, “Historians tell stories.” They investigate origins by putting things into words. Local history begins as a matter of the senses — that tangible thing the Zoomers love — but it proceeds to “expanding the powers of perception” and then putting things into words. Kyvig and Marty say, “If artifacts are to be more than merely perceived and appreciated, they must be understood in words — that is, handled conceptually.”
Maybe I haven’t taught this part well. I’m going to do better hereafter. So that when one of my students encounters a wicker trunk with leather handles that came over from the old country, she will want to get to know Henry Huber, the strapping farmer who came from Saratov via Liverpool on the steamship Dynomotor; married and farmed and became a US citizen and raised a family in McIntosh County; but held onto this wicker trunk, took care of it, so that when his family presented it to the historical society, it remained in excellent condition.
So many stories to tell. How fortunate we are. We should do it well.
