Detailed Schedule

Summer Seminar:  "The Frontier Experience in the American Midwest:
Greater Illinois to 1860"
June 29 through July 31, 2009
Illinois College - Dr. James Davis, Seminar Director

Week 1   (June 28-July 3):

• Sunday.  Move into residence hall.  Informal gathering with refreshments & soft drinks.
• Monday Morning.  Introduction, welcome, and questions and answers.  Distribute books, articles, handouts, and related materials.  Presentation by Dr. Eric Grimm, Curator and Chair of Botany, Illinois State Museum Research and Collections Center, on "Illinois Ecology over the Centuries."  Campus and town orientation. 
  Early afternoon.  Very brief presentation by staff of the Illinois College Office of Information Technology on how to access the Internet and e-mail on campus.
• Tuesday Morning. Discuss handouts on contingency and history, and discuss presentism and relativism.  Introduce themes of  the Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis and criticisms of the thesis.  Briefly cite "New Western History."  Discuss "Settlers in Frontier Illinois: Primary Evidence, Persistent Problems, and the Historian¡¦s Craft," and the "art and science" of "doing" history.  Video on Cahokia Indian site.  Discuss article by Raymond Hauser.  Discuss video, features of Indian there and elsewhere, idea of "edge" settlement, and impact of Indians.  Brief presentation on Frontier Units by Amy Schwiderski, Illinois College Department of Education.
• Wednesday Morning.  Discuss chs. 1-2 in Frontier Illinois.  Discuss motivations of French colonialism, arrival of French, nature of French society and economy, map of French system of "long lot" (or "ribbon") farming in North America and map showing distribution of rivers and portages in greater Illinois.   Discuss articles by Susan Boyle and Winstanley Briggs and pp. 1-47 in Atlas of Great Lakes Indian History.
• Thursday and Friday  Travel to Lewis & Clark State Historic Site in Hartford, IL which prepared a "teaching kit" for the NEH participants in 2003 and which I will ask to do the same for 2009; Cahokia Mounds in Cahokia, IL, where the visitors' center gives a first-rate introduction to the largest man-made prehistoric structure north of central Mexico; the Museum of Westward Expansion ( the "Arch" museum) in St. Louis, MO; Ste. Genevieve, MO, founded c. 1735 by French settlers, and the Bolduc House Museum, the visitor center and its informative exhibits and film on the Mississippi River, gardens, and other features of French settlement and society from the late 1700s and early 1800s; ferry boat ride across the Mississippi River; Fort de Chartres State Historic Site, Prairie du Rocher, IL, Fort Kaskaskia and the Pierre Menard House in Ellis Grove, IL.  This two-day trip is essentially an updated trip I have made a number of times over the years with my students and in 2003 with the NEH Summer Seminar participants.

Week 2 (July 6-July 10):

• Monday Morning.  Discuss two-page handouts on water sites and historical settlement and hamlet and village morphology.  Discuss chs. 3-4 in Frontier Illinois and pp. 48-95 in Atlas of Great Lakes Indian History.  Discuss problems faced by British and roles Illinois and the West play in heightening those problems.     
• Tuesday Morning.  Discuss chs. 5-9 in Frontier Illinois.  Video on George Rogers Clark.  Discuss video.  Discuss arrival of American power, cultural clashes with Indians and French, roles of Spain, and diplomatic and military initiatives.
• Wednesday Morning.  Discuss pp. 96-154 in Atlas of Great Lakes Indian History.  Discuss handout maps dealing with the Ordinance of 1785 and surveys (Townships, Ranges, etc.), the Ordinance of 1785 and the Northwest Ordinance, county formation, and the military tract.
• Thursday Morning.  Visit the "Under the Prairie" Frontier Archeological Museum (currently located in Elkhart, but expected to relocate to a site near Springfield, IL, by 2009).  Presentation there by Dr. Robert Mazrim on what the archaeology of early Illinois reveals.  Visit and tour the Illinois State Museum, focusing special attention on the superb "At Home in the Heartland" exhibit.
• Friday Morning.   Presentation by Dr. Terry Martin, Illinois State Museum, on "Free Frank" McWhorter (New Philadelphia, IL), and archeology of sites involving former slaves and free blacks.  Visits to Woodlawn Farm, just outside of Jacksonville, and in afternoon to New Philadelphia in Pike County.

Week 3 (July 13-17):

• Monday Morning.  Presentation on relgious/cultural development in frontier Illinois.  Discuss cultural tensions, battles of slavery and those involving race, and other tensions.  Discuss Marilyn Klein and David Fogle, Clues to American Architecture (65 pages), two-page handout on architecture, handouts on urban morphology, two-page handout on "A Guide to Identifying Architecture," the sixteen-panel pamphlet "Historical Walking Tours of Jacksonville."  Take walking tour of early (1820s-1850s) Jacksonville architecture.
• Tuesday Morning.  Discuss impact of soils, prairie-forest battles, climate, topography, and other natural features had on settlement.  Presentation by Dr. Allan Metcalf, MacMurray College, "Dialects & Settlement Patterns."  Discuss Frontier Unit projects and next week's work in the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum and the Illinois State Archives.

• Wednesday.  The Society of Historians for the Early American Republic (SHEAR) will hold its annual meeting in Springfield from July 15-20, on "Abraham Lincoln and His World."  Seminar participants will attend at least one day of this conference.  Dr. Davis will select the date of attendance based on the topics of the presentations (yet TBD).
• Thursday Morning.  Discuss chs. 10-12 in Frontier Illinois and pp. 155-174 in Atlas of Great Lakes Indian History.  Discuss migration, forms of migration, and factors affecting settlement.  Discuss evolving technologies, especially steam, and immigration and resulting tensions.  
• Friday.  Conduct research at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum and the Illinois State Archives.

Week 4 (July 20-24):     

• Monday Morning.  Discuss chs. 13-14 in Frontier Illinois  and my article (1983) of "Letters Reveal Life at Old IC," in which student life at Illinois College in the 1830s and 1840s is depicted.  Discuss cultural ties with New England, cultural battles, and the emergence of the Second Party System. 
• Tuesday Morning.  Discuss Kenneth Winkle, The Young Eagle: the Rise of Abraham Lincoln.   See the movie Young Mr. Lincoln, starring Henry Fonda.  Discuss. 
• Wednesday Morning.  Discuss the handout of and Indenture of Apprenticeship in New Salem in 1836. Discuss William Holmes McGuffey and pp. 74-75 ("Sam and Harry") from "McGuffey's New Second Eclectic Reader for Young Learners."  Visit Lincoln's New Salem Historic Site, Petersburg, IL. 
• Thursday Morning.  Discuss handout maps of greater Illinois in the 1830s and 1840s.  Discuss handout maps of farmsteads from plat books.  Discuss handout of evolving urban morphology and ten-page handout from The St. Louis City Directory for the Years 1841-1842 and four additional pages from the directory dealing with frontier urban growth. Discuss demise of the frontier.
• Friday Morning.  Research projects in the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum and the Illinois State Archives.  In mid-afternoon walk to the Old State Capitol, Lincoln Law Offices, Lincoln Visitors Center, and Lincoln Home.

Week 5 (July 27-August 1):

• Monday Morning.  Participants consult with Amy Schwiderski about Frontier Units, and then work on Frontier Units in Schewe Library, using photocopied materials from last week¡¦s research and roles of microfilm of newspapers. Presentation by Linda Cockerill on "Health, Sickness, and Cures on the Frontier," and discussion.  
• Tuesday Morning.  Discuss chs. 15-16 in Frontier Illinois.  Discuss handout of map, etc., of railroads in the 1850s and impact on Illinois, Midwest, and country.  Discuss two-page handout on the formation of early cemeteries, the significance of changing technologies, and symbolism on markers, tombstones, and carvings.  Visit East Cemetery in Jacksonville.
• Wednesday Morning.  Discuss The Social Order of a Frontier Community: Jacksonville, Illinois, 1825-1870, by Don H. Doyle.   View a DVD documentary called "Prairie Tides:  The Building of the Illinois & Michigan Canal," which chronicles the Illinois and Michigan Canal and the "tides" of change across the Illinois prairies.  Discuss radical evolutions between early 1840s and 1860s in frontier development, and note the emergence of the Trans-Mississippi West and how it differed in fundamental ways from the Trans-Appalachian West.  Visit the Duncan Mansion in Jacksonville, residence of Governor Joseph Duncan who had ties with Abraham Lincoln.
• Thursday Morning.  Discuss the legacies of the frontier, today's understandings of the frontier, and possible future understandings.  Finish Frontier Units.  Present and critique each other's Frontier Units.  Submit Frontier Units to Amy Schwiderski for post-Seminar review and feedback. 
• Friday Morning.  Conclude, review, evaluate Seminar.  Cookout (or pizza in the event of rain).
• Saturday.  Participants depart.