Month: May 2022

In this activity, describe your initial idea for a final project. What is your main topic? What kinds of primary sources might you use? Who is your intended audience and how will they engage with the project?

My initial idea was to further evaluate women physicians from the eclectic medical college in Cincinnati (from last semester’s project) who also became activists for women’s right to vote, like Alice Stockham. This led me to early female physicians who also were suffragists, like Harriot Keza Hunt and Dr. Anna Shaw. I may not keep this focus, but this is my starting point. So far, my early primary sources will be the women’s magazine archive, the library of Congress, and the Library of Virginia. Initially, I was also fascinated by the National Women’s Party and the fires they had in front of the White House on New Year’s Day, 1919, so I may incorporate that and how the movie, Iron Jawed Angels, depicted this compared to the primary sources about the events. The anti-suffragist paper “The Woman Patriot” described this event as a riot. However, since there is a movie and a teaching exhibit website done by the Library of Congress about these events already, I may need to change my focus to local or state archives and have been looking at the Ida Mae Thompson archive at the Library of Virginia. I may make a trip there to look at some of the materials on the Equal Suffrage League of Virginia and see if I am allowed to take photos and digitize them as primary sources for a focused website. Virginia did not ratify the amendment for women to vote until 1952. The suffrage movements and anti-suffragist primary sources are plentiful and digitized at the Library of Congress website. Still, the state of Virginia has a lot of boxes of suffrage material in Richmond and could see what that is there has not been digitized and do a website on a few materials there. The audience will be students interested in USA history and women’s history. I hope to get some guidance on narrowing the topic to maybe one person or event within the women’s suffrage movement.

History teaching has its own history, and this week’s readings on the evolution of teaching history is even more important today. History teaching is in a precarious position as some states are trying to censor the teaching of history as it pertains to slavery and harkens back to a memory type of history teaching associated with nationalism. Key concepts for historical thinking include an in-depth analysis of the range of primary sources around the event, or person, or historical period.

“Stretch our imagination and embrace ideas that are an anathema.” [1] This is a crucial concept about learning how to analyze primary sources within their context. Teaching how to read primary sources and analyze primary sources, like journalism and media, within the context of the time is essential. This type of historical thinking does, at times, feel like science, as proposed by Ranke. [2]Reviewing as many primary sources as possible and not reviewing any secondary sources for twentieth-century events is somewhat impossible and untenable. Historical thinking can be directed depending on the level of the student. What works for a middle school student will not necessarily be the same as a college student. Teaching historical thinking can be directed by research questions. [3] This technique can be tailored and helps the student.

Three questions I have about historical thinking and teaching include: How do I develop historical empathy for the side I don’t agree with? Like the anti-suffragist movements by women? I am not sure how to answer that question, but with the research of the primary sources of the period, I hope to figure it out and present their side from the primary sources The second question is an easier one, how do we not return to the memory tradition in history teaching? The disciplinary practice of researching multiple primary sources and critical research questions to students helps teach how to think historically rather than the memory tradition. The third question is how to help people question the narratives already written and get excited or interested in topics that have been reviewed or known in USA history?  Digital humanities can be a way to add a new way to teach in a topic that people have a basis of knowledge like the declaration of independence or the abolition of slavery.

[1] Sam Wineburg. “Thinking about Historical Thinking.” Interview.

[2] Lévesque, Stéphane. Thinking Historically. 35. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008

[3] Lévesque, Stéphane. Thinking Historically. Chapter 6. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008

• who you are;
• key skills and interests, including questions from prior course(s) in the certificate program;
• learning goals for this course;
• professional role you have/hope to have related to teaching and learning history and how this course can help; and
• a photograph of yourself (for blog post)

I am a second career-seeking student in applied history. My concentration focus is USA history before 1877. I have interests in indigenous history, the impact of colonization, and military conflict. Over the last year, I have expanded into medical history, and my digital projects have been about medical history. I am excited about this class as it is about teaching history. I want to develop a digital project on something that appeals to high school or AP USA History students. My last project was very specialized, and since this is a short semester of nine weeks, I may have to be limited to an expansion of some information I learned in that project about women’s suffrage. After getting this degree, the professional role that I hope is to have anything related to history. I am open to almost any career I can find, so I hope this helps expand my teaching knowledge. Questions I have from prior courses are about network word analysis. Is this a common for these projects? And are they helpful for teaching or just primary source analysis in a different way? My skills, I would say what I have learned so far, are Omeka, Audacity, and Davinci Video Editing and sound mixing. Definitely, feel like I need to go back and do some refresher on making maps and some of the intro skills like with Kepler, as I like interactive maps and would like to include it as a learning goal for this class

The journey to this final project was a circuitous one. It was a road trip drive to see family I had not seen in years due to Covid. My stay involved a Victorian decorated B and B in a small town, St. Paris, Ohio. In this house were old medical textbooks in one of the rooms. The titles of authors I had never heard of in medicine. I was confused even further when I opened the book, and the words eclectic medical institute stood out underneath the author. What was eclectic medicine? I wanted to answer that question for myself due to my interest in medical history.

 I quickly realized after polling people that interest in what was eclectic medicine was mine alone. It would not interest the public, nor would a dry textual website about their medical textbooks and how they were different.  As an allopath and as a historian, I was asked the tricky question that I am still trying to answer, how do you separate your knowledge and interests as a doctor from the primary source analysis and writing of a historian? I still working on that process. I figure due to Covid, people are interested in medical history more than normal right now so why not do a medical history website?  The other interest I could draw on was medicinal plants and the art of old botany texts, with a tie in to Lloyd Library. Eclectic medicine believed in plants as medicine. Medicinal and herbal plants could draw an audience of women and men who like to garden. The history of plants used by Native Americans was incorporated by homeopaths and eclectics alike. While I did not get to develop this train of historical inquiry for eclectic medicine fully, I asked women and men that were part of this initial audience.

The audience that I interviewed did change that initial focus away from plants and more to the history of medicine for the time. The Gilded Age is a current show on HBO and tying that in with the peak of the Eclectic Medical Institute felt like a way to appeal to the audience of historical fiction.  My audience was also curious about the cost. How much did treatment cost? Were eclectic doctors similar to alternative herbalists of today? Cash only and expensive usually? This led me to ask the Lloyd Library for later cases of Dr. John King and how much he charged. I narrowed the focus to just female cases as I knew he was also a professor of obstetrics and gynecology for many years. Once I got the images, this helped the website planning even more. Cases about female nervousness and chronic self-abuse were amusing, but how do I put them in historical context?

              The advice given by my professor was to ask three nonmedical people what they would like to see on the internet; well, the short answer was almost always sex. The website then became more geared toward the treatment of women and the sexual morals of the time.  One of my classmates also asked about hysteria as a common female diagnosis of the time and how did they treat hysteria? The eclectic physicians believed it was due to a malposition of the uterus like regular physicians. There is a significant misconception about people thinking that hysteria was due to the beliefs of a wandering uterus, but by the gilded age, all physicians knew human anatomy. There are 10 to 15 percent of women who have a standard variant of the uterus tilted backward instead of forward. The uterus can also change positions due to tumors or cancer. To fix the uterus back to its “correct” position, eclectic physicians would push the uterus up from the vagina, and they learned this from traditional allopathic physicians. Hysteria may have been due to epilepsy, anxiety, or other medical disorders, but whatever the underlying psychological or medical condition, hysteria was definitely not caused by a uterus tilted backward!  I included a page on hysteria due to the interest and a picture from an allopathic physician textbook showing to put the uterus back in place. Complete quackery.

              The cost for these treatments was expensive in today’s dollars. Using an inflation calculator, the costs were substantial in the cases that discussed cost. Dr. King was a prominent physician and people paid a lot of money and traveled to him for treatment as there were women from multiple locations around Cincinnati. I learned that there were eclectic physicians all over the country, and they developed their own eclectic medical associations within states and nationally, like the American Medical Association of today. This was intentional to fight for recognition as a legitimate type of medical care.

              Overall, the experience was humbling over the semester as my website design skills with classic Omeka needed some work. My time constraints also limited me to a website that leaned toward entertainment and the history of quack medicine and sexuality in the Gilded Age. As a historian, I want to learn more about the female graduates as there were more women who graduated from the Eclectic Medical Institute than from traditional medical schools.   Learning how to tailor the website due to audience input was the most helpful part of the process and evaluation of my own work and others helped me improve my reviewing skills.