College on the Move Q&A: A living and public history trip through the Southeast

, , , , , ,

Editor’s Note: How can students get valuable study abroad experience at home? John R. Legg, an Affiliate Editor with History@Work and PhD student at George Mason University, interviews Dr. Niels Eichhorn about a public history-oriented domestic study trip that introduced students to American Revolution, Civil War, and Civil Rights-era historical sites around the Southeast.

A group of people stands and consults a map in an outdoor setting.

Eric Campbell, a park ranger with the National Park Service at Cedar Creek & Belle Grove National Historical Park in Virginia, visualizes the Battle of Cedar Creek to Niels Eichorn’s “College on the Move Program” in 2017. Photo credit: John R. Legg.

 

John Legg: Welcome, Niels! Thank you for joining us here at History@Work. Today we’re going to chat with you about your living history program, “College on the Move,” that gave undergraduate students the opportunity to see historical sites and engage with public history throughout the American Southeast. How did you create the College on the Move program and what were the general hopes and ambitions for such a summer travel course?

Niels Eichhorn: John, thank you for the opportunity to introduce the College on the Move Program (CotM) to your readership. In part, the idea grew out of my interest in public history, the joy of touring historic sites with students, and my interest in the complex interplay of tourism and historic preservation. When I was playing with the idea of a domestic study program, I drew inspiration from Dr. Robert Carriker, a professor at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, who created a summer course taking students on a two-week themed trip to historic sites.

The program started officially in the summer of 2015. The first installment of CotM was a tour of the Civil War and Antebellum Southeast with stops at National Park Service-managed battlefields, as well as plantation sites. The second iteration of CotM was a tour of the Carolinas which included ventures to the Civil Rights Museum in Greensboro, North Carolina, Revolutionary-era battlefields, as well as Civil War and plantation sites. The third and final tour of CotM in 2017 visited Virginia with stops at Mount Vernon, the Williamsburg area, Appomattox, and the Shenandoah Valley.

A group of people consults a map while a park ranger addresses them.

Students on the 2015 “College on the Move” program learn about the Battle of Chickamauga from NPS park ranger Jim Ogden. Photo credit: Niels Eichhorn.

The goal of CotM was to take students out of the classroom to experience historic sites. This allowed the students to connect physical experiences with the literature they had read in class. For example, after reading about how plantations have historically been silent on slavery, students visited sites both where those silences were still evident as well as ones where the interpretation had recently changed to introduce a more nuanced and accurate approach to the topic.  In another example, students had read about exhausted soldiers but had second-guessed their exhaustion in the face of victory.  However, when you walk all day on a battlefield and you collapse exhausted into the chair of the air-conditioned van, you have a much better appreciation of what these soldiers went through. Students experienced these historical challenges when we walked up “Thayer’s Approach” at Vicksburg.

JL: How did students engage with public history beyond learning contextual history at the sites? What sort of assignments did you assign for them to think and write and create beyond the standard history assignment?

NE: One of the challenges with CotM was figuring out assignments that reflected the goals of the program and introduced students to the methodology of public history. I used different assignments every summer and only felt that by CotM 2017 I had finally found the assignment most fitting to the public history nature of the tour. Each program included three assessments: participation in discussion during the tour, writing site reviews modeled on those in The Public Historian, and a final critical reflection assignment.  The reflective assignment changed from year to year. Although I began with a focus on the influence of topography on history, I eventually settled on an assignment for students to investigate and challenge interpretive plans and exhibit layouts based on the effectiveness of techniques they learned in readings and at the sites they’d visit. These projects forced students to use their research skills to produce a project that had a potential real-world application.

A row of small clapboard cabins painted white with brick chimneys stands on a grassy lawn in a wooded area.

A row of slave cabins at McCleod Plantation in Charleston, South Carolina. Photo credit: Niels Eichhorn.

JL: How did students respond to the CotM?

NE:  Overall, students enjoyed the experiences of these tours, despite their exhausting nature. Due to policies at my university, these three tours were limited to history majors. I would have loved to see more diversity on these tours and hear the perspectives of non-history majors and what they would bring to the conversation, but it was difficult to make these tours give credit to non-history majors.

JL: If others (public historians, academic professors, etc.) want to implement their own CotM program, what recommendations do you have for them? What sort of red tape did you have to deal with and what advice do you have for others when they may face resistance?

NE: First of all, I have to say that the hard work you put into the course to prepare things, like arranging hotels, tours, guides, meetings, etc., is very much worth it. I found all three tours extraordinarily rewarding experiences. I learned much about history and myself in the process. So, it is lots of work, but I would do it again in a heartbeat and I had many more ideas planned for the Southwest, Civil Rights, the Lewis and Clark Route, and even Ireland.

But you are asking about recommendations for replication as well as potential red tape:

  1. Do not try the program at a small school unless you can recruit outside the history major; to be successful you want a broad base of students who could potentially join the trip. Few people can do a summer trip of two weeks because of the costs involved and time commitment, which dramatically limits your pool of travelers.
  2. If at all possible, work with study abroad to offer the program as a domestic alternative for students who are not sure if they want to go overseas or for whom the costs of study abroad are too high.
  3. Try and recruit beyond your university if possible. For all three CotM trips I reached out to faculty around the state and in the first year, a student from another school joined the trip. I also asked every year to go to study abroad fairs at other universities, but I did not receive administrative support for that.
  4. You are your own best ally. Do not count on people above you to work as hard as you to make this trip a reality or to support your efforts to recruit students.
  5. Money. You can be an extraordinary planner and detail-oriented micromanager; you will get the budget wrong. Gas prices go up or students drop out at the last minute. It happens, but you want to make sure that those above you understand that. Similarly, because it is a costly undertaking, try and find financial support from the Alumni Association, Dean’s office, money from experiential learning budgets, or departmental scholarship fund. I had 9 students on the first trip and I strongly believe that part of the reason for the high enrollment was that I could divide $4000 of scholarship money between them. The other two years, the students received only $200 from the QEP office when costs were higher and fewer students enrolled.
  6. Plan your stops well in advance. Some National Parks–looking at you Harper’s Ferry–can be booked up early. Some are very gracious with their time and volunteer a full day with a ranger and in other places, you have to pay for that benefit. But it is always a good idea to reach out early and get on their calendar. Be flexible; there will be some odd experiences. Take some time to connect with friends in the public history sector and NPS. Overall, I have found that sites are very helpful and accommodating for educational groups, but it involves a lot of phone calls.
  7. Always have a Plan B in mind for a rainy day, and not just when the heavens open up in the South.
  8. Get a seat cushion. There will be many meetings to sit through to make it work.

 

~Niels Eichhorn is a historian in Macon, Georgia. He is the author of Liberty and Slavery: European Separatists, Southern Secession, and the American Civil War (LSU Press, 2019), Atlantic History in the Nineteenth Century: Migration, Trade, Conflict, and Ideas (Palgrave, 2019), and The Civil War Battles of Macon (The History Press, 2021). He tweets @niels_eichhorn.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.