Ellen Eisenberg | Looking for Zalman: Making Historical Scholarship Visible to Undergraduates | The History Teacher, 38.3

Looking for Zalman: Making Historical Scholarship Visible to Undergraduates

Ellen Eisenberg
Willamette University

LIKE MANY WHO TEACH undergraduate history, I have made efforts in recent years to bridge the gap between my teaching and my research. In highly focused, upper division courses, it is often possible to share my own work with undergraduates by assigning an essay I have written or by using my own primary source material as the basis for in-class exercises. Yet the majority of courses that I teach are not in my area of research, and in these classes it is more difficult to draw meaningfully on my own work when trying to engage students in discussions about "doing history." In the spring of 2003, however, the convergence of a research seminar I was teaching with an unfolding scholarly project—which turned into a mystery—resulted in an unusual opportunity to share my experiences as a researcher with students. Although the focus of the course was not directly related to my project, the parallels between my students' research processes and my own quickly emerged. My mentioning of my project soon grew into brainstorming sessions in which students tried to imagine new sources for me to consult, debated standards of historical evidence, and mused about where to draw the line between fruitful research and a wild goose chase. This experience suggests the kinds of new questions and directions that can emerge from an attempt to make one's scholarship visible to students.

Over the last several decades, undergraduate history instruction has increasingly emphasized efforts to engage students in hands-on historical research. Texts that present students with sets of primary sources for analysis are now widely available. These texts strive to build students' research and analytical skills, and engage them in the evaluation of evidence, aiming to model for them what historians do and encouraging them to "think more like a historian."¹ Their editors—and many of us who use them in our classrooms—see this approach as serving the dual purpose of building student skills in preparation for upper division work, and increasing their enthusiasm for the discipline of history. As William Bruce Wheeler and Susan D. Becker note in the preface of Discovering the American Past: A Look at the Evidence, "as they acquire or hone these skills, students generally discover that they enjoy 'doing history,' welcome the opportunity to become active learners, retain more historical knowledge, and are eager to solve a series of historical problems themselves rather than simply being told about the past."²

While such texts are a useful tool, particularly in survey courses, additional strategies are needed to develop students' understanding of the discipline and the role of the historian. My efforts in this area tend to fall into two rather broad categories: first, having students learn to read and analyze a wide variety of primary sources—and ultimately to locate and select those sources independently—and second, showing students that historical writing does not emerge solely from a single historian's encounter with sources, but from participation in "conversation" among scholars through journal articles, conference sessions, lectures, and monographs. In class, I require students to engage in both categories of activity through sequenced assignments that guide them through the processes of framing research questions, seeking sources, analyzing them, responding to alternative interpretations in the secondary literature, and engaging with one another's research in class. In addition, I make my own activities as a scholar—so often invisible to undergraduates—visible: I talk about conferences I attend, I discuss my research projects, and occasionally I assign materials I have written or primary sources that I use. Although I have made this campaign of visibility a priority for several years, it generally does not amount to much in terms of class time. In many classes, my "campaign" amounts to a series of brief remarks and asides over the course of the semester. In spring 2003, however, the special nature of the course I was teaching and a rather unique research problem that had come my way, came together to allow me to share not only my findings but also my frustrations, challenges and attempts at problem solving with my students. The purpose of this article is to show not only how I was able to use my own research to engage students in discussions about the research process but how these discussions became directly applicable to and enriched their own research projects.

Background: The Course

I was teaching a course that I had developed in 2001, "Social History Practicum: Local History" as an upper-division research seminar (for syllabus, see appendix A). The goal of the course is to engage students in original research that takes advantage of local archival resources—Willamette University's campus is located within blocks of both the State Library and the State Archives, as well as across the street from the county historical society. In order to ensure that student researchers have common ground for discussion, the course focuses on a single twenty-year period each time I teach it. I place local history in the context of the American West, with common readings designed to provide students with a sense of the issues and themes in western history. Journal articles focusing on small communities in roughly the same period provide models for the twenty-page research paper students are required to produce.

While each student pursues an individual research project, class exercises and reading assignments provide context and shared experiences. For example, early in the course we visit Salem's Pioneer Cemetery. Students are given time to wander through the cemetery, taking notes on what they find interesting, and using their observations to develop a research question. They respond, for example, with observations about clusters of children's deaths, fraternal society markings, the group of Japanese graves in the corner of the cemetery, the many graves of Civil War veterans (from both sides), and the prevalence of individuals born in the upper South. From these observations they frame questions about epidemics, migration patterns, social organizations and the ethnic composition of the population. The exercise serves as a useful introduction to the kinds of social historical questions that might be illuminated through research on a community like Salem.

During the first several weeks of the course, we alternate among three different types of class sessions. Some of the sessions aim to familiarize students with local archives. These sessions include field trips to the county historical society and the state archives, where many students encounter original manuscript sources for the first time. A second group of sessions are set up as workshops, in which students analyze primary sources like censuses and newspapers. These sessions are aimed at both introducing students to these important sources and establishing a common sense of who lived in Salem during the period in question (in 2003, the focus was 1870–1890), and the kinds of events and issues that were noted in the newspaper. Before the several class sessions on the census, I pass out a section of the manuscript census to each student, and, as at the cemetery, ask them to make observations and frame questions. During the in-class workshop sessions, students work together to answer some of the questions—pooling their sections of the census to discern occupational patterns, patterns of ethnicity and family composition. The census work also makes students aware of residential institutions located in Salem, including the state school for the blind, the state penitentiary, and the state mental hospital. For the newspaper sessions, different students are assigned to survey particular periods. This assignment requires students to go off campus and to read the newspaper on microfilm at either the state library or the local public library. Students are required to select a sampling of front pages and one complete edition to share with classmates. In class, they report on trends and lead discussion on their selections.

A third type of session focuses on secondary sources. An anthology of article-length essays provides students with an introduction to some of the themes that might be addressed in a local western study, and with a sense of different approaches, sources, and methodologies (in 2003 I used Frederick Luebke's anthology, European Immigrants in the American West). Carol Kammen's On Doing Local History serves as a practical guide to framing questions and locating sources. The contrast between the two texts provides a framework for discussing differences between antiquarian approaches and the more academic historical studies that serve as our models. Patricia Limerick's Something in the Soil introduces themes in the "New Western History," and reinforces my efforts to make historians visible, since many of Limerick's essays address her experiences as an historian very directly.

Student projects have explored very varied aspects of local history. One popular theme—largely because it is so unexpected—has been Salem's diversity. Because students tend to think of our city as a place that has only recently started becoming diverse, they have been drawn to evidence that suggests unexpected diversity in the second half of the 19^th century. Several projects of this type arose directly out of students' examination of the census. Thus, in 2003, one student traced the small community of approximately fifty-eight African Americans listed in the 1870 Marion County census. The in-class newspaper project had revealed that this community held an annual Emancipation Day celebration that generated enthusiastic coverage. In another instance, the 2001 class was struck by the large number of Chinese men in the state prison—they represented only five and four-tenths percent of the state population in 1880, but nearly fourteen percent of the prison population. This led one student to focus his research on racial bias in late 19^th century sentencing patterns, by comparing the sentences of Chinese and white criminals convicted of the same crimes. Discovering the Chemawa Indian School in the 1880 census led one student to examine the reception of the school by Salem residents. Others have explored subjects ranging from the expansion of the public school system to the establishment of the state mental hospital. One used divorce records to try to understand marital expectations, while another traced the economic development of the small farming town of Jefferson, located a few miles from Salem.

Background: My Zalman Project

In keeping with my campaign to make my work as an historian visible to my students, I made sure to mention, "the Zalman project" on the first day of class in January, 2003. At the time, I did not anticipate that the Zalman project would become an important part of the course—indeed, it had nothing to do with local history and seemed a little remote from the concerns of the class. Still, I began the class by describing what historians do, how class assignments are modeled on those activities, and, by way of example, mentioned my current scholarship.

The Zalman project was one that had fallen into my lap the previous spring. A gentleman whom I had met at a dinner had asked me to look at a manuscript that he believed was of historical interest. It was a memoir, he told me, of Zalman Goldfarb, the grandfather of a close friend of his. He had taken an interest in the memoir, which, he said, was beautifully written. He had hired someone to translate it from the original Yiddish, and he believed it was worthy of publication. Would I take a look at it? I agreed to do so and was pleasantly surprised when the manuscript arrived a few days later. The story was vivid, beautifully written, and fit very well with my interest in East European Jewish immigrants to the American West. It was filled with wonderful imagery, and touched on many key themes in American Jewish history.

Indeed, Zalman, Zelig-like, seemed to always be where the action was.³ The early part of the text tells of Zalman's arrival as an immigrant in New York. Jewish life on the Lower East Side comes alive as Zalman talks about everything from Charlie Chaplin movies to the Yiddish theater, from work in the garment industry to his enthusiasm for the Bund. He waxes poetic about Jewish foods like schmaltz herring and a certain brand of knishes. He is in the audience to see all of the great names of the Yiddish theater. He is in the street when the Jewish Daily Forward is born.

After falling in love with a beautiful girl and finding he can't make a living in New York, Zalman heads to the Industrial Removal Office, an agency that aimed to relocate immigrant Jews to areas outside the eastern metropolises in order to foster their assimilation and prevent the concentration of immigrant Jews in the ghettoes of cities like New York. Soon, Zalman is sent off to become the only shoemaker in a town called Los Rios, Texas. Later, he sojourns in Nashville, where he gets involved in politics, meets his hero Eugene Debs, and runs for city office as a socialist. Finally, he relocates permanently to Southern California, where he marvels at the eternal sun, enjoys the Yiddish cultural life, and joins a Jewish hiking club.

I soon learned that the text was not Zalman's own memoir as I originally thought, but the work of well-known Yiddish author, Gershon Einbinder, also known as Chaver Paver, and had been published in Yiddish in 1955. While it had been excerpted in an English language anthology of Einbinder's work, it had never been published in its entirety in English. The opening chapters, in Einbinder's voice, seem to support the family's claim that this was the story of their grandfather: the writer had come to California to visit Zalman—apparently an old friend—and record his story. As Henry Goodman, who translated portions of "Zalmen (sic) the Cobbler" for the English language anthology, wrote, "Chaver Paver was writing about people he knew, Zalmen and Zalmen's wife, Golde."⁴ After several chapters describing Zalman and Golde in their old age, Zalman's voice takes over.

I loved the "memoir" from the first read and believed it was publishable along with a few historical essays framing the experience. I planned to write one on settlement in the West and another on the Jewish Removal Office. The text itself would require little more than light editing, and some annotation to identify Yiddish terms and some of the people and events referred to. As a social historian with experience tracing the historical records of individual immigrants, I also decided to support the text with documents supporting Zalman's story such as a newspaper article about his run for office and the ship record documenting his arrival at Ellis Island. I believed these might make it attractive for classroom use. The editors to whom I submitted a proposal in the fall of 2002 received it warmly. Hence it appeared to me, in December of 2002, to be a promising, straightforward and doable project. While I planned to wait until the summer break to write the essays, I decided to gather the supporting documentation during the spring semester, 2003.

Local History Meets Zalman

Because the first several weeks of my Local History class focus so heavily on introducing students to sources and discussing their usefulness, it quickly became clear that the Zalman project—despite the lack of connection to Oregon—was an excellent fit with the course. For example, as students familiarized themselves with the 1880 census, we discussed what I might learn about Zalman from the census. How would locating him in the manuscript census help to document his story? Students quickly noted that the census would help me pin down the dates, which were vague in the text—when, exactly, had he moved to Texas? When did he marry? When were his children born?

The students themselves had begun charting patterns in the Salem census, and they had initially focused on occupational patterns, patterns of ethnicity, and household composition. They soon began to discern clues in the census to Salem's character: how rural it still was, that it was a place where most people lived in families, and that it had a relatively even gender ratio. They had noted the unexpected diversity evident in the census: the cluster of African American households, and the large number of Chinese men. Students had quickly come to realize that understanding who lived in a place suggested many possible research questions. Indeed, observations from the census have led to some of the most productive student projects that this class has produced, including the one on African Americans in Salem (given Oregon's exclusionist stance, we were surprised to find any), and the one on sentences of Chinese men. A paper on the town of Jefferson took much inspiration from these census sessions, and the student who did this project went on to do an extensive analysis of the family and occupational structure of Jefferson, grounded largely in census research.

Therefore, as the students in my present class charted patterns in the Salem census, they began to see rich possibilities for using the census to understand Zalman's life as well. They pointed out that the census could be more than a tool for looking up Zalman as one might look in a phone book. Rather, the census, they realized, could tell me much about the environment in which he lived. Who else lived in his town? Where were they from? Were there other immigrants? What was the occupational structure? What kinds of businesses were there? Was Los Rios, Texas a family-oriented place or a stereotypical male-dominated frontier town? Certainly, the census might give me some sense of the social context in which Zalman operated in Texas.

With my class working hard on analyzing the Salem census, I decided to pursue questions such as these and that the census was a reasonable first place to look for Zalman. Looking for him in New York seemed futile, but finding him in a small town in Texas should be reasonably simple. I knew from the manuscript that Zalman was in Texas in approximately the period 1899 to 1906, because he refers to the Dreyfus trial and there were two—one in each of those years. If the correct date was 1899, that might mean that Zalman would turn up in the 1900 manuscript census in Texas. This would be a stroke of good fortune, for it would be far easier to find Zalman Goldfarb and to know he was indeed my Zalman Goldfarb if his name appeared in the census record for Los Rios, Texas, than if it had appeared in New York City records.

But when I started to look for that record, I discovered a problem: there is no Los Rios in Texas. Perhaps it was an error in translation? Or a town that at one time existed but no longer exists? There was a Del Rio, which seemed promising—but I couldn't be certain this was the town. After trolling on the internet for Los Rios, I discovered another candidate: Plano, Texas had an area called Los Rios. Was this it? I sent a query to a genealogical group in Texas asking about Plano and Los Rios. At once, a remarkably helpful woman named Joy wrote back: "the area around [the Plano] Presidio was once known as Los Rios. Do you have any reason to believe that these people were from North Texas?" I wrote back with my clues—the place is referred to as "Los Rios," it had a railroad station, a post office and a courthouse, and there were references to saloons, cowboys, horses, and a priest. Using this information, Joy suggested that Marfa, Texas might fit the bill—it was called Los Rios because two rivers joined there—it was a county seat (and therefore had a courthouse), on the railway line, and it had (as did most towns in the area) a Catholic church. She didn't comment on the saloon, the cowboys or the horses—but it seemed reasonable to think that these were present as well. Joy offered to look up Zalman on the 1900 census—and failed to find him—but since I didn't know whether he had been there in 1900, that absence proved nothing. Eager to help, she also looked him up—unsuccessfully—on the Ellis Island website—a search I had already conducted without success, even after trying any number of alternative spellings of the name.

My failure to find Zalman in the census or on Ellis Island led to my class's first conversation about negative results. At this point, still confident in the text, I used the opportunity to emphasize to my students that historical research is often full of dead ends. I recalled for them various dead ends I have encountered over the years—organizational records missing just for the years I need, the absence of the 1890 census (lost in a fire), etc. In order to show problems in reading sources I brought in photocopies of handwritten manuscript census and ship records. It was useful to do this because the class was fortunate to have available a typed transcript for Salem, so we were not working from handwritten copies in class. Just a glance at my examples of faded and sometimes blurry pages with their script writing was enough to convince my students that it was certainly possible that Zalman's name could have been so blurry or faded that it was entered incorrectly into the database, or not entered at all. I noted that we never knew for certain that he was in Los Rios by 1900, so not finding him there did not mean much. I mentioned that I have not been able to find my own grandfather on the Ellis Island database either—and I know that he did arrive there. The entire class began to appreciate their good fortune in working from a typed transcript of the census. We compared the issues involved with looking for an individual in the census (as I was doing) to using the census to learn about a community.

Having transmitted the lessons of persistence, I enlisted the class in brainstorming for alternate sources. From the start Texas had seemed a promising place to look for Zalman because he would stand out more there than in New York. I had students examine a short passage in the memoir and make lists of possible items in Zalman's paper trail. However, students quickly realized that it was quite possible for someone to have lived in a particular place without leaving a trace. Zalman had not gotten married until after his sojourn in Texas ended and, with no marriage or birth certificates, no evidence that he had bought property, and no certainty that he had been there during a census year, it seemed clear that his time in Texas might have escaped detection in the historical record. This was a lesson that several students soon experienced first hand in their own research. One, investigating the African American community in Salem, found that the fifty-eight individuals appearing in the 1870 census had disappeared by 1880. In the 1895 state census, she found eleven African Americans in Salem, but none of them were the same individuals who had been here in 1870. She had little success locating them in other sources. Once they left Salem, there was simply no way to determine what had become of them. Another student, despite finding evidence of support in Salem for the Modoc Indian War, had tremendous difficulty identifying local residents who had fought in the war.

Still, careful reading of the Zalman text led to two last possibilities in Texas. The manuscript describes at some length Zalman's involvement with the local parish priest, and the priest's sister Dina—a redhead who fell for Zalman. Perhaps I could find out something about them through church sources. The online handbook of Texas informed me that two Catholic churches had served Marfa by the mid-1890s. I also looked up the churches in Del Rio and Plano. Several calls to the local parishes, and to the diocese turned up no record of a priest in the period who lived with a sister named Dina. Nor could the American Jewish Historical Society, which holds the archives of the Industrial Removal Office, verify that a Zalman lived in Los Rios, Texas. Only five shoemakers were sent to Texas by the IRO—none to any town sounding anything like Los Rios, and none with a name that was close to Zalman Goldfarb.

By this time, students had selected their topics, were engaged in their research and in the midst of exploring new potential sources of their own. The student researching divorce cases noted that the same county level files included marriage, birth, and death records. This led me to change my search from Texas to California. The manuscript made it clear that Zalman had lived the latter part of his life and died in California, and California was a state for which there is a computerized death index. This index revealed that a Harry Goldfarb died in California in 1941—but no Zalman Goldfarb.

These various attempts to find Zalman provided useful fodder for class discussion. Students marveled at the willingness of total strangers (Joy from Texas, several helpful secretaries in diocese offices, and the woman from the American Jewish Historical Society) to dig around in the records for me. The use of the California death index led several students to find genealogical sites on the internet that proved useful in their research. Finally, the discovery of Harry Goldfarb prompted a discussion of the prevalence of name changes, and of how a historian might determine whether two individuals with different names might be one and the same. Students wishing to trace former residents of Salem who had left—like the African Americans from the 1870 census—faced the same problem. Another student was laboring to match the names in the index of Modoc War soldiers that she had found at the state archive with names in the Salem census, but she found it impossible to determine whether the John W. Brown who fought in the war was the same John Brown who had been a saloon keeper in Salem in 1870. Ultimately, she found no way to determine this definitively. All of these frustrations—theirs and mine—fostered a new appreciation for the difficulties of historical research.

Having reached a dead end in Texas and California, I turned to Nashville. My students brainstormed again to create a list of possible paper trail items: city directories? censuses? newspapers? election records? The memoir said that Zalman Goldfarb had run for public office and described the negative press coverage of his campaign. Certainly, such public activities should be easily traceable. The manuscript did not provide a date, but it did indicate that Zalman's run for city treasurer had preceded Eugene Debs' visit on the eve of the American entry into World War One. Clearly, the election would have been in the 1910s, probably between 1915 and 1917. By this time, my students were familiar enough with local sources to be able to make excellent suggestions, such as city directories. We had looked through several during our field trip to the Marion County Historical Society, and several students were using city directories in their own research to locate residents or institutions, or to look at business advertisements. For example, it was in the Salem City Directory that the student researching African Americans found her first indication of segregated schooling in Salem: It had listed "Central Primary [school] (for Colored children)—Miss Maggie L. Patton, Teacher. School House located on corner High and Marion; estimated cost $1200."⁵

Our examinations of city directories had made clear that they didn't just have phone book type information, but also often contained information about city government. A city the size of Nashville seemed certain to have had city directories in which I might find a listing for Zalman Goldfarb or even information on the election in which he ran, Therefore, the students and I decided it would make sense to order via interlibrary loan microfilm copies of the Nashville City directory, and along with it, a Nashville newspaper. It turned out that the Nashville city directories actually did list a Harry Goldfarb who was a shoemaker in town. This caused some initial excitement. Harry Goldfarb—whose wife was Annie not Golde—appeared in the 1913, 1914, and 1915 city directories. This suddenly made the California Harry Goldfarb seem a more likely match. But the 1920 census made it clear that there were two Harry Goldfarbs—one in California and one in Nashville—and neither could be Zalman. The California Harry Goldfarb was only twenty-eight years old in 1920—too young, since Zalman came to America as an adult in 1893. The Nashville Harry Goldfarb was still living in Nashville in 1920—long after Zalman would have relocated to California.

The city directories indicated that there had been elections in 1913, 1915 and 1917 and listed all of the city officials as well as candidates and vote totals for the elections—but there did not appear to be any Jewish shoemakers or Socialist Party candidates involved. Press accounts of these biennial city elections revealed no public discourse about an immigrant Jewish socialist candidate for city treasurer. Indeed, there was no record of a city treasurer race at all. Finally, I e-mailed the Metropolitan Clerk in Nashville—surely, if Zalman had run for office, there would be some record. She responded: "I have researched your question about the election of city treasurer in Nashville, and my old minute books indicate that on October 27, 1915 an ordinance was enacted to create the office of Treasurer for the City of Nashville, but the legislation further states that 'said officer shall be nominated by the Commissioner of Finance, Lights and Market House subject to the approval of the Board of Commissioners.' That wording indicates to me that it was an appointed, not an elected office."

Clearly, the silences in the record were beginning to add up. Soon, the conclusion seemed inescapable: Einbinder's Zalman was not, after all, Zalman Goldfarb. Class discussion of my project began to revolve around when to quit and exactly what the silences of the records meant. Some students suggested that the story might still be based on the real life of someone with a different name. Yet the absence of a Jewish socialist candidate in Nashville elections of the period, and the fact that the IRO did not send a shoemaker of Zalman's description to any town resembling Los Rios, seemed to suggest that Einbinder's Zalman was not a real person at all. Whether the smiling shoemaker in the picture from Pasadena which was included with the manuscript had any role in inspiring Einbinder is difficult to say. What is clear is that the major episodes in the narrative were fiction—expressions more of Einbinder's passion for socialism and reflections of some of his own experiences in New York and California, than a true accounting of an individual's life.

Now, like at least one of my students, I had on my hands a research project that had not panned out. As she struggled to deal with the fact that her research on the participation of Salem residents in the Modoc Indian War had yielded no evidence of direct involvement, I faced up to writing to the book series editors to let them know that, while Einbinder's novel was a very interesting work of fiction, it was not the historical memoir I had believed it to be, and was therefore not appropriate for their series. Class discussions turned to salvaging something from projects that had reached dead ends, a process that required a shift toward explaining why Salem residents had not played an active role in the war in my student's case, and a shift in audience in mine. If the "Zalman Goldfarb Memoir" was not to be an editing project resulting in a published book, perhaps I could focus instead on the process of evaluating the manuscript and its connections to my teaching.

Although the particular circumstances of my Zalman/Local History project would be difficult to replicate, I believe that the experience demonstrates the benefits of bringing one's work in progress—including one's failures—into the classroom. Too often, when students learn anything at all about their professors' research, the focus is on our successes, the book or article that is published, or the public lecture presented. It is difficult for students to relate their own research and papers to that finished, bound, polished, and published work. In contrast, in this case, despite the fact that the Zalman project was not directly related to Salem's history, students were able to see a very direct parallel between their own research and my search for Zalman. Our conversations made it clear that I was brainstorming, exploring, evaluating my findings (and my dead ends), and struggling, just as they were. Those struggles opened opportunities for students to not just hear about, but to participate in, the process of thinking creatively about new potential sources and the evaluation of findings. Students saw clearly that the success of my project was not preordained.

Indeed, one of the strongest lessons that I have taken from the exercise is the value of sharing my failures and frustrations with students. Showing students the marked up "revise and resubmits" I've received comforts those who find my comments on their papers daunting. Revealing receipt of a rejection letter and commenting briefly on strategies I'm thinking about for revision and resubmission has led to useful discussions of how one might frame an article differently for different audiences— an issue to which students, whose papers are often read only by the professor, have given little thought. Even mentioning to a student who comes to my office hours for help with a paper that I, too, am struggling with an article I am writing helps to bridge the gap between my role as professor-historian and their experience as a student-historian.

Although my Zalman project may have initially seemed an awkward match with a local history class, focusing on the research process as it unfolded allowed striking parallels to emerge between my own work and my students'. Making students aware of this project provided them excellent insight into the research process. When I had shared sources with students in the past, I always selected the most useful sources, the best finds. Such examples enable them to see sources that I considered important, and yield useful discussions about evaluation of sources. Yet when students go out to find their own sources, they often find documents that are far less useful. With this project, students saw the sources that didn't pan out. These—in some ways more than the great finds—provided excellent opportunities for students to think creatively about alternatives, and to discuss standards of evidence.

Finally, students were able to engage actively in discussions about how to transform a project that had turned out quite differently than originally planned. My Zalman project has (so far) evolved into three interrelated essays. The first, "Looking for Zalman: Misadventures in Memoir(?) Literature" was presented as part of a panel on the evaluation of personal memoirs at a regional professional conference. The second, "Salem and Zalman," was the keynote address at the annual dinner of the Marion County Historical Society. The third is this journal article. While a far cry from the published book I had envisioned, my Zalman project has become a useful model for making the work of the historian more transparent and meaningful to students.

Notes

^1. John Hollitz Thinking through the Past: A Critical Thinking Approach to U.S. History, second edition (New York: 2001): 8.

^2. William Bruce Wheeler and Susan D. Becker Discovering the American Past: A Look at the Evidence, fourth edition (New York, 1998): xi.

^3. It should be noted that my students did not understand what I meant by "Zelig like." When I explained, they said, "Oh, you mean like Forest Gump."

^4. Chaver Paver (Gershon Einbinder) Clinton Street, and other stories; translated from the Yiddish by Henry Goodman. (New York : YKUF Publishers, c1974): 104.

^5. Salem City Directory 1870, Marion County Historical Society.

Appendix

Prof. E. Eisenberg
History Department
Spring, 2003
Office hours: M 8:30–10:00; Th 1-2:30
Writing Center consulting hours: W/F 10–12
Eaton 101, x6197

History 453W: Social History Practicum—Local History

Overview:
This course is designed as a hands-on course in social history, with local Salem history serving as the research focus. Students will be introduced to issues and methods through readings and discussions of social histories during the first third of the course. Students will then develop research projects, which will become the focus of group discussion and exchange. The goal for the course is for each student to produce an article-length social history paper on some aspect of Salem during the 1860s and 1870s.

Texts:
Students should purchase the following texts at the bookstore:

     Frederick Luebke, European Immigrants in the American West
     Carol Kammen, On Doing Local History
     Patricia Nelson Limerick, Something in the Soil

In addition to these texts, several articles will be place on reserve at the Hatfield Library.

Course Evaluation:
Students will be evaluated based on their participation in the seminar, and their written work, as follows:

Participation

All students are expected to attend all class meetings and to participate actively in seminar sessions. Students should come to class prepared to discuss assigned material, and, later in the seminar, to share their research findings. Students will be asked to present their own research materials for in-class workshop sessions. Students are also expected to participate actively as peer readers and in co-writing an introduction to the class anthology. 25 percent of the final grade will be based on participation.

Response papers

All students are expected to prepare brief (1 to 2 page) response papers each week, except for those weeks when another written assignment is due. Early in the semester, these papers will focus on the assigned reading or source material for the day, or on a class activity. Students should come to class with the response in hand, so that it can be used as a basis for discussion. Later in the semester, students' response papers will be in the form of research reports—a brief summary of the research completed during the week, and a discussion of issues and questions raised during the week's research. 15 percent of the final grade will be based on response papers.

Research paper

All students will complete a research paper, approximately 20 pages in length. The paper (including all of the steps outlined below) will be worth 60 percent of the final grade. To get credit for the paper, students must complete each of the following steps:

Paper proposal: a brief statement of the issue or question to be investigated, along with a statement of the student's interest in the topic—due February 20 (5% of final grade).
Annotated bibliography: a description of the sources to be used. Students are expected to use both local primary sources, and secondary sources that place the issue in a regional, national, or comparative context. Due March 11 (5% of final grade).
Paper outline: an outline indicating the line of argument and the way sources will be used to support that argument. Due April 3 (5% of final grade).
Rough draft: Due April 24 (5% of final grade).
Oral presentations: May 1 (5% of final grade).
Final paper: Due May 6 (35% of final grade).

Course Schedule:

Tuesday, 1/21:	Course introduction: Who lived here? Who died here? Where did they come from?
Thursday, 1/23:	Local Topics & Their Larger Significance Reading: Luebke, introduction, chapters 4 & 11
Tuesday, 1/28	Local History: Questions and Resources Reading: Kammen, introduction, chapters 1, 2 & coda to chapter 3 Field Trip: Marion County Historical Society
Thursday, 1/30	Census Baselines Reading: Luebke, chapters 2 & 3
Tuesday, 2/4	Census Baselines, continued Reading: Luebke, chapter 5
Thursday, 2/6	Field Trip: State Archives
Tuesday, 2/11	Newspaper Records Reading: Luebke, chapter 10
Thursday, 2/13	Newspaper Records & Methodist Archives
Monday, 2/17 & Tuesday, 2/18	Individual Meetings on Research Proposals
Thursday, 2/20	Discussion of Proposals; Where Do We Go From Here? Proposals Due!
Tuesday, 2/25	Issues in Western History Reading: Limerick, Introduction & part I
Thursday, 2/27	Issues in Western History Reading: Limerick, part II
Tuesday, 3/4	Issues in Western History Reading: Limerick, parts III & IV
Thursday, 3/6	Issues in Western History Reading: Limerick, part V
Tuesday, 3/11	Findings Reports in Class Annotated Bibliographies Due in Class Primary Source Discussion Session I*
Thursday, 3/13	Writing Local History I Reading: Kammen, chapter 3 and Luebke, chapters 6 & 7
Monday, 3/17 & Tuesday, 3/18	Individual Consultations— no class
Thursday, 3/20	Writing Local History II Reading: Luebke, chapters 8, 9, & 12
Week of March 24: Spring Break
Tuesday, 4/1	Individual Consultations—outline preparation
Thursday, 4/3	Research Reports Outlines Due in Class Primary Source Discussion Session II*
Tuesday, 4/8	Secondary Source Discussion Session I**
Thursday, 4/10	Secondary Source Discussion Session II**
Week of 4/15	Individual research and writing consultations
Wednesday, 4/16	STUDENT SCHOLARSHIP RECOGNITION DAY
Tuesday, 4/22	Individual research and writing consultations
Thursday, 4/24	Rough Drafts Due in Class Group writing task: anthology introduction
Tuesday, 4/29	Feedback session on all drafts and on introduction
Thursday, 5/1	Class Presentations & Feedback
Tuesday, 5/6	Finalizing anthology introduction. Final papers due!
*For Primary Source Discussion Sessions, students are expected to bring to each session one of the primary sources that they are using in their research. Please bring sufficient copies for everyone, be prepared to lead a discussion on your source, and to describe the ways in which your sources are informing your research.
*Students are expected to distribute to the class copies of a scholarly article that they are consulting in their research in advance of the class session*. Be prepared to lead a discussion on your article and to describe the ways in which it is informing your research.

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