Education – American Disasters

February 27, 2014December 16, 2020

The Effects of the Spanish Influenza on American Education from 1918-1920

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Every year on Memorial Day students at my high school, Culver Academy, gather in the chapel to commemorate the students who lost their lives in American wars. The list of names for World War I is always longest. In 2009, my school was on lockdown because of the H1N1 virus that was apparently sweeping the nation. Students did not have to go to classes if they did not feel comfortable doing so, and many students stayed shut in their own rooms for two weeks. The Spanish Flu came up in passing in my biology class at the time, and I decided to do a little more research on the subject.

I found out that more people died of the Spanish Flu than as a result of WWI. This discovery left me with the question, were Culver students affected by the flu as well? If so, why don’t we commemorate their lives? What happened to Culver students in the midst of a pandemic? I would like to know if and how the Spanish Influenza affected students, teachers, and administrators. Did the flu affect some region more seriously than others? Did it affect some types of schools more than others? Did it affect universities more than grade schools? Did it affect Davidson College? Did this outbreak lead to any policy changes with regards to health in schools? I think that journal entries could give me a look into attitudes towards the flu. Contemporary newspapers could do the same and also provide information about which school records I should look into. Attendance records, payrolls, and school infirmary records would let me know how the influenza spread across campus. Contemporary legislature could suggest if anyone attempted to make policy changes. Medical journals, histories of education, books and articles about the Spanish Flu, and personal interviews might help me frame my research.

I have already started looking into some sources, and right now I am worried that I will not be able to find enough scholarly works to support an argument about education and the influenza. Most sources that I find discuss the age groups and social classes of the people who were infected, but not how the influenza affected school systems, or even more broadly, how it affected any kind of existing government structure. I wonder if this is a result of preoccupation with the War, or if I am simply looking in all the wrong places. Before I go any further with this topic, I’d like to make sure I can find enough primary sources to make a claim about how the flu affected schools between 1918-1920.

January 22, 2014December 16, 2020

Historicization in historical study versus popular imagination

All three articles for Thursday’s reading examine the ways in which we think about history and the lenses through which we examine it. Rebecca Edwards, of New Spirits fame, continues the thoughtful discussion that we have been having as a class about whether the moniker of “Gilded Age” is appropriate for the time period we are discussing. Rightly, she argues, as we have discussed, that the most prominent Gilded Age stereotypes do not fully characterize the era. To wit, she raises the Grange movement, the Populist party, the American Farmer’s Alliance, the Interstate Commerce Act, the Sherman Antitrust Act, and muckraking journalism, among other items.

Edwards’ ardent argument regarding historicization of the Gilded Age clearly emerges from a depth of knowledge, and I don’t seek to reject her interpretation out of hand; yet, I think that her frustration with existing perspectives on the Gilded Age comes from teachers and students, not from historians. The dominant narrative of the Gilded Age, which Edwards’ glosses in her opening paragraphs, does not, I believe, dominate the historical literature inappropriately. Rather, the nuance with which Edwards would like students of history to examine the Gilded Age is lost in the shuffle of high school classes which cover American history from colonialism to the eve of World War 2. Unfortunately, that lost nuance drives popular perception of the Gilded Age as one of pure corruption, crony capitalism and Jim Crow. Yet, serious students of history still examine these issues with the perceptiveness and depth which Edwards desires. It is simply not reasonable to expect that the nation as a whole will embrace a complex vision of each era of history when eras themselves tend to get reduced down to their very essence by teachers who must move through them in a week.

I fully agree with Price’s perspective that the Supreme Court’s conservative decisions during this period eviscerated the ability of reformers to make serious legislative progress. His analysis is also apt in that he acknowledges the inadequacies of Edwards’ argument regarding the significance of reform in this period. I would like to reiterate my own perspective: the dominant narrative of this period does not eliminate the possibility of the existence of counter-narrative occurrences; rather, the dominant narrative exists because is most accurately summarizes the dominant trends in Gilded Age society.

January 20, 2014December 16, 2020

Why Study the Gilded Age?

Calhoun argues that the Gilded Age is under-studied and misunderstood, a conclusion that my education has supported. Although I am but one student out of so many that learn about American history in our nation, I believed that I received a high caliber education. However, my AP US History teacher, like so many that Calhoun criticizes, stereotyped the Gilded Age as a period of “superficiality, pretense, and fraud.” We breezed through the period, moving on quickly to more ‘interesting’ topics such as the Progressive Era and World War One.

But why does this misunderstanding matter, a question that both Molly and Sarah have dealt with. For me, this question goes back to the question of why we are students of history: to better understand the present vis-à-vis the past. My AP US History teacher not only presented a flawed view of the Gilded Age, as seen by Calhoun, but also failed to make the connections that bring relevance to the topic. New Spirits makes this astonishingly clear, tracing the roots of our modern society back to this tumultuous period. The Gilded Age brought about changes that form the foundation of our society today, including the new morals and ways of life that guide our decisions. However, I see more than that, I see also the beginnings of debates that are key today, such as our national dependence on fossil fuel, the trials of commuters to the cities that are so often depicted in our mass media, and the role of that our government should play in private lives. These and many more key issues and aspects of our society today were either heavily impacted by the Gilded Age or find their origins in that period.

Dr. Shrout’s posting on the climate disasters of 2013 are particularly enlightening in view of the connections made in chapter two of New Spirits, of how the natural world influenced America’s development. This is examined on page 45 of Edwards’ work, going into depth on how weather patterns influenced the development of the Great Plains.