Day 1 - Morning Overview
Content Immersion: The topic will be explored by experts using primary and secondary sources with a focus on inquiry-based learning and 21st century learning standards.
UNDERSTANDING: Expansion has dynamic results including conflict, cultural assimilation, adaptation, and changes social roles.
ESSENTIAL QUESTIONS: What opportunities and problems arise when countries expand? (social, political and economic).
Image: Shows tension between wild untamed nature and the cultivation and commercialization of the land, punctuated with the river forming a question mark in the middle.
View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm—The Oxbow, 1836
Oil on canvas; 51 1/2 x 76 in. (130.8 x 193 cm) - Gift of Mrs. Russell Sage, 1908 (08.228)
http://www.metmuseum.org/works_of_art/collection_database/american_paintings_and_sculpture/view_from_mount_holyoke_northampton_massachusetts_thomas_cole/objectview_zoom.aspx?page=22&sort=0&sortdir=asc&keyword=&fp=1&dd1=2&dd2=0&vw=1&collID=2&OID=20010844&vT=1
- Group discussion of the image - give basic info (artist, date, key facts)
- Participants go through Connect and Wonder phases of the Inquiry Process to generate questions. (We provide analysis tools.) (Show bubbl.us activity - The Oxbow)
- Group discussion of the questions they generated:
- How would you investigate these questions?
- Which questions seem more promising than others?
- Link them to what they need to do.
- Brainstorm investigation for a few questions.
- Backup and do a guided reading of the image. Get them to the question mark. (Insert link to sectioned images)
- What direction is the country heading?
- Cultivation of the wilderness and implications.
- What is nature good for?
- Aesthetic sensibiltiy & spiritual power or something to work, transform, dominate
Picturing America Resources for the Oxbow painting:
http://picturingamerica.neh.gov/downloads/pdfs/Resource_Guide_Chapters/PictAmer_Resource_Book_Chapter_5A.pdf
Question: How did the US transform western lands into productive factors in the capitalist economy and what effect did these transformations produce?
- How was wildland distributed?
- Problems
- fairness / class differences
- What were the consequences of turning nature into material commodities?(commodifying of land)
Analyze maps (Google Earth example: Land Division.kmz)
- non-rectangular division of the land
- contrast with land divide under Land Ordinance of 1785
- map that shows both sides of the Ohio River
- Ohio (grid)
- Land use map both sided of the Ohio River (Ohio/Kentucky)
- Colton's railroad & township map of the state of Ohio, New York, 1854.
- Bridgman's new reversible railroad distance and township map of Ohio and United States compiled from the most authentic sources.
- Kentucky (no grid)
- Lloyd's official map of the State of Kentucky New York : J.T. Lloyd, 1862. (JP2000 file appears broken – Check Back Later)
- Map of Kentucky & Tennessee exhitibing the post offices, post roads, canals, rail roads
- speculation of division and use of land
The distribution and consequences mattered
- how the land was divided
- consequences
- how it affects the people already on the land
The US moves from colonial ways of distributing land to organized way of dividing
- Pennsylvania vs. Louisiana maps
- Given to eldest son vs. distributed for a range of resources
- A map of Wayne & Pike counties, Pennsylvania (1814)
- La Tourrette's reference map of the state of Louisiana (1848)
- Texas
- Austin vs.
- Commanche lands
- Cherokee lands
- New map of Texas : with the contiguous American & Mexican states (1835)
- Land use map Iowa and Illinois
- Rail road and county map of Illinois showing its internal improvements 1854.
- Map of Illinoise [sic] / constructed from the surveys in the General Land Office and other documents by John Melish.
- Johnson's new railroad and township copper-plate map of Illinois, Iowa, & Missouri, from the latest and best authorities. - New York, 1859, c1857.
- railroad
- monopoly
- corporate control
- How the public domain has been squandered (1884)
- Conservation movement
- Marsh document
- Address delivered before the Agricultural society of Rutland County, Sept. 30, 1847. By George P. Marsh
- American Progress George A. Crofutt: 1873
A new land distribution system developed in order to make workable farms as quickly as possible, but the land system tended to have inequalities built into it:
Relate to today - Rights and responsibilities toward the environment
- speculative markets (need new image)
- this system would become useless when you get to the Rocky Mtns.
- national forest (system was for dividing agricultural lands)
Problems
New understandings:
- how the landscape came to look the way it does
- populism
- water rights
- conservation movement is the end of this process
- national forests
- land taken out of this distribution machine
- regional differences between land distribution in East and West
Use wikis, blogs, Google Earth to display our new understandings.
Use a blog to reflect.
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Some ideas for resources for the morning session can be found in the linked Word document (See Comment Below):
Research.docx
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Comments (1)
patterke@mscd.edu said
at 9:10 am on May 6, 2009
I've attached a Word Document with some ideas for primary sources for the morning session. Please note that it varies somewhat from the flow found here, so I'm leaving is separate until we can hash it out.
~Keith
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