Current Initiatives
National History Day Northwestern Regional Competition 2009
The Center for History Teaching and Learning and the Department of History at UW-Eau Claire will host the Northwestern Regional Competition for National History Day on Wednesday, April 1, 2009. This year's theme is "The Individual in History: Actions and Legacies" For further information, contact Kate Lang at langkh@uwec.edu.
To learn more about National History Day in Wisconsin go to: http://www.wisconsinhistory.org/teachers/historyday/about.asp
Or, complete the National History Day registration form in Microsoft Word format now .
You can also visit the UW-EC McIntyre Library National History Day Page for ideas, to ask a librarian a question, or to connect with other people working on history day in Northwest Wisconsin.
The Virtual Museum of the Chippewa Valley
The Center is committed to building the Virtual Museum of the Chippewa Valley created by Roger Tlusty, Professor Emeritus, Dept. of Foundations of Education.
Making a House an American Home
In 1872, Eau Claire - a mill town on the Wisconsin lumber frontier - officially became a city. On the city council approving the incorporation was Herman Schlegelmilch, gunsmith, store owner, and German immigrant. Only the year before, he and his wife Augusta had commissioned a new home on the edge of the downtown area. They had built their house out of brick so that it would be safe from the fires that raged through the rapidly growing "sawdust city." Members of the Schlegelmilch family lived in that house until the late 1970's when one of them, Agnes Barland Mc Daniel, a nurse trained at Johns Hopkins who had spent much of her life as a medical missionary in Siam, gave the house to the Chippewa Valley Museum (CVM).
Just outside of Eau Claire in the town of Wheaton, in the early 1860's, Norwegian immigrants Lars and Greta Anderson commissioned Gabriel Jensen to build a log house on their farm. He built it out of local materials using shipbuilding techniques. Jensen was a shipbuilder in his native Norway, but discovered a greater demand for his skills in home construction in his new land. In this three-room cabin with an upstairs loft, the Andersons raised six children and the Big Elk Creek Lutheran Church held its first services. Members of the Anderson family lived in this house though the 1940's, adding several rooms. In 1977 Leonard and Gertrude Anderson donated the house to CVM and moved it to the museum grounds.
In 1903, Waldemar Ager, a Norwegian immigrant and novelist who had come to Eau Claire to work as a typesetter and journalist for the Norwegian language temperance newspaper Reform, bought a house a couple of miles away from the Schlegelmilch house on Chestnut Street. Brady Anderson, another immigrant from Norway who worked as a carpenter had built the house a few years earlier for his own family. In that house, Waldemar Ager and his wife Gurolle raised nine children while Reform grew in popularity. On the eve of the First World War its circulation reached 10,000 copies and its readership stretched from northern Illinois and the Dakotas to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. The Ager family owned the house until 1962 when Luther Hospital purchased it. In 1993 Luther Hospital donated the house to the Waldemar Ager Association (WAA) and moved it two blocks to its current location.
The stories of these preserved structures reveal how residents of the Chippewa Valley built their community. The story of their community is part of the larger story of immigration to America in the nineteenth century.
The Center for History Teaching and Learning received a National Endowment for the Humanities consultation grant for 2004 to help us figure out how to develop a single interpretation that will use these structures to communicate this story to the public. Kate Lang directed this phase of the project and we invited well known historians of immigration to the Midwest, Professor Kathleen Conzen from the University of Chicago, Professor Russell Kazal from the University of Toronto, and Professor Tobias Brinkmann from the University of Southampton, along with Max van Balgooy, Director of Interpretation and Education at the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and Stephen Long,Vice President of Collections and Education at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum.
The Tenement Museum is a model for our project. Check it out at http://www.tenement.org/.
Learning by Doing: Public History in the Classroom
The Center for History Teaching and Learning is also a partner in this project which is funded by the U.S. Department of Education Teaching American History Program. Learning by Doing has received two separate grants (2003-2006 and 2004-2008). With this funding, the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire Department of History is providing fellowships to help 100 elementary and secondary (4-12 grade) public school teachers learn new ways to teach American history through an innovative two-year, 12- to -15-credit graduate certificate program. The program will reach additional teachers who will participate in district based study groups. The "Learning by Doing: Public History in the Classroom" program has been created by Project Director Patricia Turner, Professor, Dept. of History, to give teachers the necessary content, experience and resources to develop standards-based curriculums that emphasize project-based strategies. Research in the teaching and learning of history demonstrates that history is best learned when students have opportunities to apply their historical knowledge and skills meaningfully within and beyond the classroom. Students learn the practice of history and American history content by collecting and interpreting historical data for research projects. In short, for teachers and students alike, the best way to learn history is to do history.
