Category: Delaware

Finding the Past While Strolling Delaware Communities With a Class

The Central Hotel about 1914 in Delaware City

Communities all around Delaware make excellent learning laboratories for classes that are seeking to increase historial-thinking and understand the evolution of our 21st century environment.  With that in mind, I often take undergraduates out for fieldwork, especially this time of year as autumn gets underway on the Peninsula and the days are ideal for strolling.  The focus of these experiential learning exercises is to demonstrate how to understand the history that is all around by showing them where to look, what to look for, and how to examine the visual evidence.

So we spent this morning in Delaware City considering how physical, economic, cultural and political forces shaped growth and development of the quaint little town at the eastern end of the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal.  This applied research in a classroom without walls gave us the perfect place to gather evidence and talk about how and why this place looks the way it does.  In preparation for the trip that explored the physical and built landscape, technological changes and demography, we scrutinized photographs, maps and other primary document that served as the foundation for our investigation.

Next week, we are going to venture down below the canal to look at two other towns, Middletown and Odessa, for a comparative case study.  Together these towns provide the perfect laboratory for comparing and contracting how and why development of three Delaware communities took place and analyze the different paths they took over the centuries.

The Central Hotel in Delaware City today.

Teaching New Delaware History Course at Wilmington University This Fall

Delaware map from the David Rumsey Collection.
Delaware map from the David Rumsey Collection.

Wilmington University has asked me to teach a new course in Delaware History.  It runs during the Fall Semester and I’m excited to be the professor for this recent addition to the University catalog.This is going to be an  active learning course.  As we examine the transformations that have taken place in First State, from the period of discovery to the present, we will have learning labs and hands-on history walking tours.  Throughout the semster, I will incorporate practical fieldwork into our learning strategies.

This will be an engaging and informative course that explores the past that is all around us in Delaware.

Voters at Last: Battling for the Ballot — A New Program Available From the Delaware Humanities Forum

This is a new program available from the Delaware Humanities Forum

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This program examines the struggle to extend voting rights to most adult citizens in Delaware and the nation.  Using archival photographs, newspapers, cartoons, letters and speeches the  organizing, petitioning, picketing, leafleting, educating, and politicking that went on is presented in a lively way.  The program picks up the story as debates swirl over whether voting rights should be extended to white males regardless of property ownership.  From there it traces history through the extension of the vote to African-American men, takes note of the attempt to disenfranchise voters, and concludes with a closer look at the time when vocal suffragist pushed forward a movement to extend the right to women.  Special attention is paid to the women’s suffrage movement in Delaware

Pass the Rum: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition — A New Program Available from the Delaware Humanities Forum

This is a new program available from the Delaware Humanities Forum

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This program looks at historical attempts to regulate the consumption of alcohol over the centuries.  While most people are aware of prohibition in the 1920s, during the so-called Noble Experiment, attempts to regulate this behavior extend far back into our past.  While the program pays deeper attention to the modern era, as the nation and the State of Delaware struggled to live with the prohibition law for nearly 14 years, it takes a much longer view. During the presentation, the audience will hear colorful stories of rum runners, moonshiners, bathtub gin, intriguing personalities, complicated politics, organized crime, outgunned lawmen, and the temperance movement.