The Place Paper Assignment

(This same text appears in the course syllabus; it is excerpted here for ease of Web reference.)

Paper Length: 5-6 pages; 6-10 pages for Honors undergraduates and graduate students

The place paper is intended to give you an opportunity actually to do environmental history yourself as a way of synthesizing what you've learned from the entire course.  In it, you are to choose some place--either located in Madison or somewhere you know well from your home or travels--and write a brief essay discussing your interpretation of some aspects of its environmental history, using materials we’ve studied in the class.  Because this is a brief paper, you’ll need to think carefully about what parts of your chosen place you wish to explore in your essay: it is far better to discuss a few aspects well than many aspects superficially.  Write a description or tell a story that will explain to the reader how this place came to have the shape and qualities it has today.  You should think of this paper is an exercise in historical, geographical, and environmental interpretation, asking you to read a small patch of landscape as a historical document of past environmental change.

Since we'd like you to be thinking about this paper from the very start of the semester, we'd like to offer you some suggestions for the how best to approach it.  Remember that the most important aspect of this assignment is for you to have an experience trying to “read” an actual landscape.  We fully understand that you don’t know enough environmental history to construct a complete or fully accurate narrative of environmental changes that have shaped your chosen place.  What we’re looking for instead is that you take a long, careful look at the place and try to see it with unfamiliar eyes, taking nothing for granted but looking at everything you see there as if you’d never seen it before. Then ask how the things you see might have come to be there. (This assignment may go better and be more fun if you imagine that you’re a visitor from outer space who’s just landed and is trying to make sense of all the strange things you see around you: why on earth do people live this way?  How did the lives of earlier inhabitants leave traces that can still be seen?)  As the first lecture of the course suggests, the trick is to ask as many questions as you can about landscapes you ordinarily take for granted.  (Remember, you can go back and reread that first lecture, which is printed as an essay called "Kennecott Journey" in the book Under an Open Sky: Rethinking America’s Western Past, edited by myself; a PDF version of it is even more conveniently available on the course page of my website.)  Use materials from the readings and from the lectures to help you think about the kinds of questions you want to ask, and do the best job you can answering these questions using the evidence you can find on the ground.  Unless you have a background in field ecology, you’d probably do well not to worry too much about trying to identify individual species of plants and animals, though you should at least look closely at these just to see what you can figure out about the way they’re arranged on the land; more importantly, though, look at the broader patterns of boundaries, buildings, street patterns, fence lines, utility services, etc., instead.

Possible Places to Write About in Madison

If you’re having trouble choosing a place to write about, consider these suggestions right here in Madison; most can easily be applied to other locations as well:

• Walk along a railroad track for a mile or more (the one behind the Kohl Center that has become a bike path west of the intersection of Regent Street and Monroe Street would be a good choice) and think about its relation to the surrounding landscape.  Ask how adjacent sites relate to the railroad, and how those relations may have changed with time.  In what ways does the railroad divide the surrounding land, and in what ways does it connect it?  How might these divisions and connections have changed with time?
  
• Spend an hour or two in a cemetery and see what you can learn from it as a historical document (the ones on both sides of the Speedway, just beyond Madison's West High School on Regent Street, are excellent for this exercise).  What can you learn about the lives of those who are buried there: how long they lived, how they died, what their family relations were, etc.?  What does the cemetery tell you about their attitudes toward life, death, and their place in the natural world?  How does the physical form of the cemetery itself (as opposed to individual graves) reflect cultural attitudes toward nature? 
• Drive or bike west from the UW stadium along Regent Street, Speedway, and Mineral Point Road until you’re well out into the agricultural countryside (if you can, go as far as Pine Bluff, or even to the point where the road finally ends at Highway 78, which would be a round trip of 20-30 miles).  As you ride, look very closely at the changing spatial arrangement of streets, buildings, and settlement patterns.  How do houses change?  Look at their sizes, styles, presence or absence of garages and porches, nearness to neighboring houses, sizes of front and back yards, relation of residential and non-residential buildings, etc., etc.  Look at the presence or absence of green space.  As you drive west, you’re essentially moving through neighborhoods that were built in each succeeding decade of the twentieth century.  The spatial changes you see directly reflect chronological changes in the history of Madison’s built environment and its relations to the surrounding landscape.
• Try comparing two different residential neighborhoods in Madison and writing a brief paper on the key differences you notice between them.  The City of Madison’s Department of Planning & Development has put together a good series of walking tours you can take of historic neighborhoods in the city, easily accessed as downloadable documents from http://www.ci.madison.wi.us/planning/walkTour.html.  You might try taking one or more of these tours, and then write about what you see along the way.  Just be careful not to write a paper that only reports what you learn from the tour booklet; be sure to look at what you see and write about the landscape itself, supplementing the guide with additional library research if you can.
• Find the “Lost City” in the southeast part of the UW Arboretum and see what you can figure out about its past.  This is an old failed subdivision from the early twentieth century which is now completely overgrown by the forest (it could be harder to find in deep snow!).  You can find a map of where to locate it in the Arboretum visitor’s center, and you could read about its past in Nancy Sachse’s book, A Thousand Ages, QK 479 S16 1974.
• Walk to the end of Picnic Point and spend time looking at the skyline of Madison.  Think about the different human elements that make up that skyline, and ask yourself how and when they might have come to be there.  Then go examine those same elements close up and read what you can from their sites.  You may benefit from exploring the very detailed and prize-winning website for UW-Madison’s Lakeshore Nature Preserve, which includes a great deal of environmental historical information at http://www.lakeshorepreserve.wisc.edu

Remember, the most important goal of this assignment is to look at a place, ask questions about it, and think about its past with reference to the historical and geographical phenomena you’ve learned about in this course.  This is much harder when you’re worrying about it in the abstract than when you’re actually doing it.  It really doesn’t matter what place you pick.  You could literally go to anywhere in Madison or your hometown and take a random walk through a neighborhood, thinking about everything you see along the way.

Although this is not primarily a paper based on written documents--we really do want you primarily to have the experience of trying to read an actual landscape--we also expect you to track down at least a few documents that will help you understand the changing landscape of your chosen place.  For instance, looking at old photographs can be wonderfully suggestive about how your place has changed in the past.  If you’re writing about Madison, there are a couple excellent photographic histories of the city and the university which are on reserve at Helen C. White Library: David Mollenhoff’s Madison: The Formative Years, F589 M157 M64 1982; and Arthur Hove’s The University of Wisconsin: A Pictorial History, LD 6128 H68 1991; there should be copies not just on reserve but in the non-circulating reference collection to; multiple copies of Mollenhoff’s heavily illustrated book are in the Geography Library in Science Hall and the Wisconsin Historical Society Library as well.  Even if you only spend half an hour looking through these, they could be extremely helpful to you, especially if you’re having trouble with the assignment.

Places to Find Sources about Your Place

There are a number of ways you could learn more about your chosen place.  The suggestions I’ve listed below relate mainly to Wisconsin places, but most would be equally well suited to other parts of the country as well.

• Look at old photographs of your chosen place.  The State Historical Society’s Iconographic Collection (located in the Archives on the 4th floor) has a vast collection of images of places from Wisconsin and elsewhere.  Nothing is better than a picture for helping you see a past place and relate it to the present. This entire collection has now been digitized, so you can now easily look at images of many Wisconsin places by searching for them at www.wisconsinhistory.org/whi.
• If you're studying a Wisconsin village or city, you might want to check to see if there are Sanborn Fire Insurance maps available for it. You can learn more about these very intersting maps at http://www.wisconsinhistory.org/localhistory/articles/sanborn.asp. Many other valuable online resources about Wisconsin communities can be found at http://www.wisconsinhistory.org/localhistory/research_wis.asp.
• For Wisconsin buildings and architectural records, see the Architecture and History Inventory (AHI) at http://www.wisconsinhistory.org/ahi. For Wisconsin and the rest of the nation, see the National Register of Historic Places at http://www.nps.gov/nr/.
• Look at a series of maps of your chosen place to see how it has changed over time.  The Cartographic Collection of the Geography Library in Science Hall can be very helpful here.  Aerial photographs might also be very suggestive if they’re available.
• If you've chosen an urban place, check out the amazing collection of bird's-eye views, most published during the nineteenth century, that have been digitized on the Library of Congress's American Memory website.  The URL for these is: http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/gmdhtml/gmdhome.html.  Check under "Cities and Towns" and search for the place about which you're writing, but don't hesitate to explore other parts of the website as well.  The American Memory website is an extraordinary source for digital documents: photos, maps, texts, almost anything you can think of.  There’s a comparable collection of Wisconsin bird’s-eye views at http://www.wisconsinhistory.org/whi/feature/birdseye/.
• In the late 1920s or early 1930s, the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources produced an extraordinary series of  “Land Inventory Maps” which show the uses of land for every township in the state.  These are available at the Archives of the Wisconsin Historical Society, and can be very helpful indeed for helping you understand changing rural land use.  (You can read more about this amazing cartographic resource at http://steenbock.library.wisc.edu/general/bordner.html, and access the actual maps at
  http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/EcoNatRes/subcollections/WILandInvAbout.shtml under “Land Economic Inventory.”
• If you want to go even further back in time, you could look at the original land survey records of the 1830s and 1840s, getting a rough sense of what the land looked like when the first American surveyors came through to impose the grid system upon it.  These maps, along with the original surveyors notes, are now also available on-line, so you can peruse them for places you know at  http://libtext.library.wisc.edu/SurveyNotes/.
• Track the changing population of the place in the manuscript census, which is available for every year between 1840 and 1930 except 1890 (for which the census records were destroyed in a fire).  Microfilms of the census for every state in the country are available at the Historical Society.  These will tell you who lived in a place, their family relationships, their birth places, their occupations, etc.  If you’re writing about a rural place in Wisconsin, you should also look at the manuscript records of the Agricultural Census, which give you a complete picture of the crops and animals raised on every farm in the state during the census years.  These are in the Historical Society too, in the back left corner of the Reading Room.
• If you’re studying an urban area, look at old city directories, which often list the residents and businesses of a community not just alphabetically but according to their street address.  A directory enables you almost literally to walk down the same street in the past that you’ve walked down in the present, seeing how the people and businesses have changed in the interval.  See http://www.wisconsinhistory.org/hp/buildings/citydir.asp for tips.
• Look at old county atlases or histories for your place.  These were published for many counties in the Midwest primarily in the 1870s through the 1890s, so can give you lots of interesting information about your place during the nineteenth century.  The Historical Society has an excellent collection.
• And of course: talk with people who have lived in your place for a long time.

ADVICE ABOUT HOW TO WRITE YOUR PLACE PAPER (WITH THANKS TO ITS UNKNOWN AUTHOR)

Finally, here are some tips about how to approach the writing of your place paper, and also about how we'll be grading it.  I've adopted these from the excellent writing standards that a colleague at the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies uses, and my colleague in turn adapted them from rubrics like this that have circulated widely on the Web.  I would love to be able to give credit to their original author, but haven’t been able to determine who that that person might be (if anyone can figure this out, I’d be very grateful to know!).  This text has been slightly modified to fit this course, but are otherwise borrowed pretty completely from my colleague’s version of the rubric.

Your goal in this Place Paper is to offer an original interpretation of your chosen landscape based on your own observations and research on the one hand, and on course readings and lectures on the other hand.  We will evaluate your work using the following criteria:

STRUCTURE: Begin your paper by introducing the reader to your place, and by orienting the reader to the major questions and interpretive approaches you intend to use for understanding it.  It's fine to start with an anecdote or a description of the place if you think that's the best way to proceed, but be sure to clarify early in the paper the main themes you'll be addressing.  Following your introduction, build your essay as a series of well-structured paragraphs.  Each paragraph should have a topic sentence, and usually 3 to 5 additional sentences that clearly support that topic sentence.  Each paragraph should explain one major idea, not 3 or 4.  Each paragraph should have a clear connection to the next.  Pay attention to transitions! End with a strong conclusion that tells readers what they've learned about your place and why they should care about the interpretation you're offering of its history.

ANALYSIS: Why should the reader believe you? What arguments for and against your thesis make sense? How can you disprove counter-arguments, or account for evidence that seems to contradict your thesis? Your analysis should offer new ways to think of the material.  All ideas in the paper should flow logically.  Your argument should be identifiable, reasonable, and sound.  Support your thesis with arguments based on evidence from your chosen landscape and from the primary and secondary sources you've researched.  All sources should be clearly and accurately identified in footnotes or endnotes using a consistent citation format from a manual such as Kate L. Turabian's Manual for Writers of Term Papers, Theses, and Dissertations, itself based on the classic Chicago Manual of Style, which has recently been published in a new edition that pays much more attention to Internet resources and forms of citation.

STYLE: We will reward clear, active, powerful writing.  PLEASE do not use the passive voice.  Do not start sentences with "It is....", "There is..." or "There are...." Use active verbs.  Revise your paper to remove wordiness, redundancy, passive voice, vagueness, and inactive verbs. Make sure that your grammar and spelling are correct.  Careless errors, especially run-ons and comma splices, WILL lower your grade.

For example: This is an example of BAD writing: "It can be shown that farmland on the Great Plains was harmed by poor farming practices."

This is an example of BETTER writing: "Farmers on the Great Plains plowed on steep slopes, causing soil erosion."

What's the difference? In the first sentence, "It can be shown" is in the passive voice, starts with the word "It," and is wordy, redundant filler.  The phrase doesn't wake up the reader, and it doesn't convey any meaning.  Get rid of it.

The phrase "farmland was harmed" is an example of the passive voice. Do your absolute best to get rid of the passive voice.  Your writing will be much more interesting and precise.  The passive voice is usually a vague copout: you don't have to say who did what and why. Revising into active voice makes you think about who is responsible. For example, the second example tells us exactly who harmed the soil: "farmers plowed on steep slopes, causing soil erosion."

ORIGINALITY: Although you can get a good grade (a B) for presenting arguments developed in lecture and section, an A paper is one that develops original insights and arguments.  We strongly encourage you to think for yourselves about the place you've chosen, giving evidence from course materials and readings, but pushing your insights based on your own observations and research.