While my final project is still a work in progress, I have been making great progress in developing and putting my project together. This week, I was able to accomplish three major objectives in completing my final project. First, I was able to select and organize the various images that I want to include to add a visual element to my project. Second, I started writing the text for the background information that will provide the context for the primary sources that my audience will analyze. Finally, I decided on the organization and layout of my project and how I want my project to look to my target audience.
My project deals with the historical narrative of the United States being a “Melting Pot.” This narrative became popular in the early years of the twentieth century, a period that saw the influx of millions of Southern and Eastern European immigrants arrive in the United States, and is still used today in discussions of historical immigration to the United States. The “Melting Pot” narrative is that various immigrant groups coming to the United States shed the ethnic identities and traditions of their homeland to become “American” and adapt to their new home. With my project, I want to challenge this commonly accepted narrative and demonstrate how the “Melting Pot” narrative is an oversimplification that ignores the hardships and struggles that newly arrived immigrants faced in the United States.
I will accomplish this by focusing on one particular Eastern European immigrant group, the Carpatho-Rusyns, and the struggle and hardships they faced in their process of Americanization because of their unique Greek Catholic Faith. To tell the story of the Carpatho-Rusyn people in the United States, I will have my audience examine nine documents that religious conflict that occurred between the Greek Catholic Carpatho-Rusyns and the leadership of the Roman Catholic Church in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These documents demonstrate that for the Carpatho-Rusyns, the importance of their Greek Catholic faith was a major obstacle and source of contention in their being accepted as Americans, thereby complicating the “Melting Pot” narrative.
The intended audience for my project is first year undergraduate students taking their first college level history course. The purpose of my project is to help these students learn the skills of historical thinking that are crucial to the work of historians. My goal is to help first year undergraduate students discover, that through the close examination of primary sources, many of our most commonly held historical narratives are either untrue or grossly oversimplify that which is much more complicated. I want to demonstrate to my audience the importance of carefully reading and analyzing primary sources in constructing historical narratives.
The next step in completing my final project, is to write all of the background and context information that I will need to provide for my audience in order for them to fully examine and analyze the primary sources I have included in my project. After I have all of the information written, I will then need to upload and arrange all of the materials I have for my project on the project website, so that they can be viewed by my target audience.
Right now, the biggest challenge I am encountering with completing my final project is figuring out how to get my project website to look the way that I want it to, and to make sure that it is visually appealing to my target audience. To resolve this challenge, I have been spending time with WordPress to see what I can change and manipulate to make my project website look the way that I want it to look.
