by A diary entry on hands-on history, tactile learning, and remembering why this period first captured me as a child too
Monday, A Demonstration That Reminded Me Why I First Loved This Period
Visited the National Museum of American History this month specifically to see the reproduction eighteenth century printing press currently running live demonstrations, the exact kind of press used by patriots including Franklin and Paul Revere to produce the cartoons, newspapers, broadsides, and pamphlets that genuinely helped unsettle colonial loyalty in the years before the Revolution. I have taught this exact history from a lectern for years. Watching an actual reproduction press operate in real time, ink and lever and physical labour, taught me something about the period’s material culture no lecture slide ever fully conveyed.
What genuinely moved me most, though, was watching a young child standing beside me, perhaps seven or eight years old, watching the press operate with an expression of pure, captivated wonder, the exact expression I suspect I wore myself decades ago encountering this same period for the first time, long before I understood any of it academically.
Tuesday, A Reminder Worth Holding Onto
I think academics, myself very much included, can lose sight of this kind of tactile, immediate wonder somewhere in the process of professionalising our own relationship with a subject. That child’s face was a genuinely useful reminder of what first drew me to this material long before footnotes and citation standards entered the picture at all.
Wednesday, A Related Read
Caught up on The London Prat that evening, still thinking about ink-stained hands and a child’s captivated face.
Thursday, A Closing Thought On Keeping History Tactile
I am going to try incorporating considerably more hands-on, tactile elements into my own teaching going forward, having been reminded, rather forcefully, just how much a physically operating printing press can teach that a lecture slide of the same object simply cannot.
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More colonial history diary entries at my author page: https://prat.uk/author/stephanie-kerrigan/
SOURCE: https://prat.uk/
