Day 3 TAHPS

Day 3
Visual History
The use of visual history is very important to history classes. This gives students the ability to make an honest connection from the information you are giving them and give them a visual to know who we are talking about. The students can now do research quite easily when they have websites available to them and they don’t have to have everything copied and handed out to them.

Steamship Arabia
The Steamship Arabia was great. I had never been there but I knew the story. I am glad that the Hawley family decided that their find was more important as a museum than as selling the items on ebay. It was overwhelming as to the amount of cargo that was on such a small ship. I understand that it was going to be sold at stores when it arrived up river. It did create several questions for me that the museum guide was able to answer. Such as has any families ever come back to claim that their family lost the items? The answer was no. Another question was insurance claims, and whether or not they were compensated from any of the goods. It turns out that only three companies made claims and they were not successful in proving how much goods were on the boat.
The most ironic part is that the boat sunk in 15 feet of water. The crew and passangers were able to go to the top deck and wait to be shuttled across to shore. How funny would that have been to be on top of a boat that was sunk.

Day 2 TAHPS

Daguerreotype photographs were some of the first photos taken. There were traveling photographers who went from town to town peddling their trade. They were able to take their equipment and do location shots or set up a temporary studio and do indoor shots. The photographs would be rather expensive and so everyone couldn’t afford to have one done. Also, if you had a death then it was common place to summon the photographer to take photos of the dead. This was especially true with children. This was done because this was probably the only visual record of the life of the child. The problem with the daguerreotype photos was that there could be absolutely no movement because there was a twenty second development time, if you moved then you would blur the photo. Some of the photos taken were of families, pets, and slaves.

The Neilson-Atkins museum was neat. The only problem was that our “experts” were reading directly from the placard that was on the wall next to the photographs. We could have done that ourselves. It was great to be able to go and do a private showing of the daguerreotype photographs. It was hard to create a reproduction by taking a photograph of it because it was created on a mirror.

TAHPS-Document 1

The Kingdom of Matthias was a very interesting read. I would say that the events that were discussed in the book took place in the early 1800s but they could have happened in present day. The religious following that Matthias had was comparable to that of Jim Jones, the Mormons, or David Koresh. They were all charismatic leaders who motivated their followers to do whatever they asked. They were also willing to give up many material possessions to make sure their “savior” was well taken care of. The fact that there was a large amount of “chosen spiritual partners” shows that Matthias had a distortion of followers who allowed them to do things that they were not comfortable with. Elijah Pierson was a devout follower who paid dearly for his beliefs in Matthias. Before he met Matthias he was a religious man, in fact, on the day of his wife’s funeral he told those in attendance that he was going to raise her from the dead. He believed himself to have some of the same supernatural powers as Abraham had. When he was not successful, he then said that he would resurrect her when the Kingdom of Heaven comes to earth. A few years later was when he met Matthias who also had an interesting history with his wife. Matthias left his wife and kids when they were still young to pursue his own interests. He soon discovered that he attained followers who were devout Christians.
In reading this book I realized how manipulating religious influences could be.