Historical Discussion…again

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I like the idea of the Mapping Indigenous LA website. It seems like a good place to get an overall idea of a subject or to be the starting point of a project. I think this would be a smart resource for a high school student looking up research for a project or for a city to use on a community website. This would even make a great opportunity to create a story map as an alternative to a final test for high school students. This semester I have a mapping project similar to the idea of this website. You are given a short paragraph explaining key points in this person’s life and have to research so you can fill in the missing periods. I can see the benefits of using a format like indigenous LA to present findings. I also appreciate that the website gives you the ability to insert videos to give further information so you don’t intimidate your audience with too much information. Overall I think that a resource such as the Mapping Indigenous LA website would be a beneficial tool high school teachers and students or as a starting point for a project.
As for the Knowles article, it seems to agree with the running theme present within the excerpts that we read for class, that History needs to be questioned. This is a statement that I agree with. As jessicak has said in the past “events may have happened, but what is recorded is chosen by who decides to record them, and even then what is recorded is never truly unbiased.” So the act of questioning historical events is truly an important task. It’s easy to just assume that the most popular answer for a question is correct but what if there are multiple causes for one effect? This article makes it evident that while plowing for crops likely enhanced the severity of the dust bowl, the cause could also be something as simple as droughts dry up the land which displaces some soil and strong annually occurring winds pick up the dust.
erodriguez317 wrote that “it is important to analyze how historians reconstruct and interpret the past.” The Knowles article and the Koppes article are both discussing the dust bowl but each author has a different stance on why the dust bowl occurred. Differing opinions are just as important as questioning history as both prompt scholarly discussion.