Resource Type: Experiential activity
Instructor: Peter Conolly-Smith
Title: Associate Professor
Department: History
Course: HIST 392W

Description

This proposal for an intermediate-level History seminar taps into students’ memory, sense of place, and history skills by focusing on a space many of them already know: Flushing Meadows-Corona Park. From its origins as wetlands converted in the early twentieth century to a dumping ground for ashes memorialized in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and on to its later incarnation as the site of the 1939 and 1964 World’s Fairs, the park’s history and those of the two fairs—richly documented, all—provide ample material for a place-based seminar that utilizes multiple aspects of experiential learning.

While all the reading and the assignments are place-based, the main experiential activities are two separate field trips to the park, one approaching from the north; one, from the South. Students will write three papers (one reflection paper, one response paper, one research paper). The seminar’s student learning objectives are threefold: that students

1. master the intertwined histories of the park and its fairs;
2. develop a sense of the ways in which place shapes history and history shapes place; and,
3. deepen their appreciation for the reciprocal influence of personal experience, memory, history, and place.