Personal History Essay
Some years ago when I was teaching history 122, I spent class time talk about the settlement of the West in the late 19th century and was describing how life on the Great Plains was very different from life back East. I mentioned that there were areas that were so devoid of any kind of wood that people made houses out of sod by cutting strips of turf and piling them up for walls and laying tin or some other covering across the top. A few of these sod houses still exist as museums. I visited one in the South Dakota Badlands not long ago.
That class on western settlement didn't stimulate any more interest than usual, but after Thanksgiving break a student came rushing into class all excited and announced that her great grandmother had been born in and lived in a sod house in Kansas or Nebraska around the turn of the century. All of a sudden something that was merely a piece of history in a book became a real part of her family, and it seemed to turn her onto the whole idea of studying the past.
Since I already knew that many people have become interested in history through studying their own family past, I decided to make the personal history essay an informal, that is ungraded, part of our course. I caution students that getting interested in your family history can sometimes become an obsession, as it was for my grandmother, who filled boxes and books full of papers about our family past, which are now stowed in my closet. Whether all that history was real or mythical I have yet to discover, but it certainly is interesting.
So for your first project I would like you to write a page or two, or more if you feel like it, about what you know of your family past. Did you have family or ancestors who fought in one of America's wars? Does anyone in your family remember the Depression? Did any of your ancestors come through Ellis Island? What are your family origins? (We are all descendents of immigrants, one way or another.) This is an optional essay and is not graded, but experience tells me it will still be worthwhile for you to do.
Occasionally students who have recently come to the United States say that American history has had very little to do with them or their family. To those I say, think about what it was about America that brought you here. Does it have anything in common with the thousands who have come before? Many of my students from other cultures have told me about life in those cultures, and I always find that extremely interesting. I have learned quite a bit about places like Vietnam, Korea, Afghanistan, Ghana, South Africa, Ethiopia, Turkey, India, Pakistan, and many other countries from my students.
When teaching this course in the classroom I had students hand in their personal history essays and often shared some of the interesting parts with the other students . Now I would like you to put at least part of your essay in the introductory forum. It doesn't have to be long—just a brief paragraph or two that gives your classmates a sense of where you came from. If you want to submit a longer essay to me by e-mail, I will be happy to read and return it.
If you want to take a look at my family history, here is a link. I should point out that the history of my family has been written and published two or three times, so I didn't have to do much work on this. But I spent a lot of my life talking with elderly relatives in their 80s and 90s about what they remembered about the past, for when they are gone, their memories go with them.