Three Miles, Two Creeks: Local Pennsylvania History in the Classroom

This article describes an undergraduate history assignment at Susquehanna University, through which students create virtual museum exhibits on the local history of Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania. Students narrate and interpret the Penn’s Creek Massacre of 1755 and the Stump Massacre of 1768. The goal is to tell a cohesive story and offer a clear viewpoint on the events while adhering to the research and design standards used by public history professionals. The historical content of the assignment emphasizes the diversity and violence of the American frontier in the decades before the Revolutionary War. The exhibition format highlights the need to think carefully about audience, voice, and storytelling, three aspects of making history that are often disregarded in student research papers. The ultimate value of the assignment is its ability to increase students’ awareness of the manipulation involved in the process of historical interpretation, even as they attempt to “get it right.

The Logical Place to Take a Picture: William Gedney in Bethlehem

This article uses the photographer William Gedney’s visit to Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, in 1975 to consider three aspects of urban touring. First, Gedney’s appreciation of Bethlehem’s aesthetics derived from his adoration of Walker Evans’s well-known 1935 photo from Bethlehem. Gedney mimicked Evans’s moves forty years later, much like fringe tourists interested in urban decay in the twenty-first century study each other’s images to establish valuable sites and styles. Second, Gedney’s visit remained largely disconnected from the variety of economic and demographic change that occurred locally in the sixties and seventies. His focus on surfaces in his photography was echoed by his surface contact with the city itself. Finally, I argue that his photographs should be interpreted in relation to his previous work in the United States and India. Gedney’s trip provides an opportunity to rework narratives of urban decline in the twentieth century

Proving Ground: Expertise and Appalachian Landscapes

The Appalachian Mountains attracted an endless stream of visitors in the twentieth century, each bearing visions of the realm that they would encounter on high. The name Appalachia became shorthand for a series of moral and economic calculations and pop culture references. Well before large numbers of tourists took to the mountains in the latter half of the century, however, networks of missionaries, sociologists, folklorists, doctors, artists, and conservationists made Appalachia their primary site for fieldwork. Proving Ground studies a collection of these professionals in transit to show that the travelers\u27 tales were the foundation of powerful forms of insider knowledge. The visitors represented occupational and recreational groups that used Appalachia to gain precious expertise, and it was to these groups that they became insiders. They were not immersing themselves in a regional culture, but rather in their own professional cultures. These were people who used the mountains to help themselves. Proving Ground is a cultural history of expertise, an environmental history of the Appalachian Mountains, and a historical geography of spaces and places in the twentieth century. By using these frameworks to analyze the personal papers, professional records, and popular works of these budding experts, the book presents mountain landscapes as a fluid combination of embodied sensation, narrative fantasy, and class privilege. It will attract students of Appalachian Studies who are interested in the phenomena of cultural and environmental intervention, environmental historians concerned with the construction of hybrid landscapes, and mobility scholars who recognize the organizational power derived from access and movement.https://scholarlycommons.susqu.edu/facultybooks/1073/thumbnail.jp

Bodies of Work: Civic Display and Labor in Industrial Pittsburgh

By the end of the nineteenth century, Pittsburgh emerged as a major manufacturing center in the United States. Its rise as a leading producer of steel, glass, and coal was fueled by machine technology and mass immigration, developments that fundamentally changed the industrial workplace. Because Pittsburgh’s major industries were almost exclusively male and renowned for their physical demands, the male working body came to symbolize multiple often contradictory narratives about strength and vulnerability, mastery and exploitation. In Bodies of Work, Edward Slavishak explores how Pittsburgh and the working body were symbolically linked in civic celebrations, the research of social scientists, the criticisms of labor reformers, advertisements, and workers’ self-representations. Combining labor and cultural history with visual culture studies, he chronicles a heated contest to define Pittsburgh’s essential character at the turn of the twentieth century, and he describes how that contest was conducted largely through the production of competing images. Slavishak focuses on the workers whose bodies came to epitomize Pittsburgh, the men engaged in the arduous physical labor demanded by the city’s metals, glass, and coal industries. At the same time, he emphasizes how conceptions of Pittsburgh as quintessentially male limited representations of women in the industrial workplace. The threat of injury or violence loomed large for industrial workers at the turn of the twentieth century, and it recurs throughout Bodies of Work: in the marketing of artificial limbs, statistical assessments of the physical toll of industrial capitalism, clashes between labor and management, the introduction of workplace safety procedures, and the development of a statewide workmen’s compensation system.https://scholarlycommons.susqu.edu/facultybooks/1002/thumbnail.jp

The History of Tourist Interest in Centralia, PA

I will talk about the research that\u27s been done in the Susquehanna University history department to examine tourist interest in Centralia since the mid-1990s. To quote from an abstract: The town site marks the virtual disappearance of an entire community and serves as a point of political and commercial tension. Although represented frequently by the media as a pilgrimage site, Centralia is officially off-limits to visitors. Although depicted often as a ghost town, Centralia retains 18 residents who refuse to be relocated. Although narrated as evidence of the emptiness of modern technology, Centralia\u27s career as a tourist site depends largely on cyberspace and digital imagery. So far we\u27ve found that visitors do not fit into the target audience of governmental efforts at promoting cultural tourism. In contrast to heritage tourism, the appeal of Centralia for its most avid visitors derives from its gothic landscape, its aura of economic and environmental failure, and its status as a bizarre, potentially dangerous modern ruin