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cla@umn.edu
612-624-9839
Stepping into History
By Phil Lewenstein
Kevin Murphy in front of the Cedar Cultural
Center on the West Bank
Photo by Leo Kim
It's quite an ambitious goal for one semester—not only to teach students about history, but to ask them to live it, from the inside. But that's exactly what's on the syllabus for assistant professor Kevin Murphy's Public History class. Murphy asks students to work with people in the community to reconstruct the community's past.
Murphy's students have been ferreting out and assembling bits of history to document the rich social, political, and cultural history of the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood on the University's West Bank. The area is a Twin Cities historian's dream, a site that, for well over a century, has been the thriving nucleus of various immigrant groups and social movements.
“Most successful public history projects develop as collaborative efforts among individuals and organizations with overlapping but not necessarily identical interests and agendas,” Murphy says. “It's important that students learn to think clearly and critically about audience needs and uses that the projects might serve.”
So students not only gather and interpret information but also develop relationships with community partners to find common ground and help advance community goals. They talk to residents and former residents, business owners, community leaders, and others, as well as examining historical documents in museums and libraries. Working in teams, they practice interview and research techniques and also test their teamwork skills.
“To make the collaborations work,” says Murphy, “students have to arrange schedules, work with others who may have different goals and learning styles, and resolve any disagreements.”
In the end, students produce an impressive array of projects for public presentation and use by the community—from oral histories to document archives to photo and film documentaries. The 2004 projects culminated in Cedar–Riverside: Histories and Visions, an acclaimed interactive exhibit at the Hennepin History Museum in Minneapolis. The 2005 projects were featured in a multimedia exhibit at the Elmer L. Andersen Library Gallery, Community/University: Students Explore West Bank History.
