We think these perspectives are interesting for those who read our website and we think they are particularly useful to high school teachers working with our lesson plans and their own broadly “social studies” curriculum. We will be adding material in the coming months. Please use the pull-down menu or click on the blue highlighted topic below.
JOANN CONDELLONE (Union Miners Cemetery Board of Trustees and Mother Jones Museum, Mt. Olive): speaking about Miners Day, Mother Jones and the Union Miners Cemetery
LACY MCDONALD (Hayner Library, Alton): speaking about concept of collecting history/history being collected in place
HELAINE SILVEMAN (Co-Director, Mythic Mississippi Project): speaking about cultural identities in Illinois and local town development
NATIVE LEGACY: a recap of the controversy surrounding the use of Native American iconography as team logos
MONUMENTS TOOLKIT: a program to remediate America’s landscape of discriminatory monuments
INTERNATIONAL COALITION OF SITES OF CONSCIENCE: a discussion of several places encompassed by the project that are worthy of being put forward for inscription
QUINCY: Historically, Quincy is one of the most important cities in Illinois. Indeed, recently its marketing office has correctly branded Quincy as “city of refuge” based on its Mormon and Underground Railroad and abolitionist histories. In a related vein, Quincy was the site of the sixth Lincoln-Douglas debate. Quincy could readily be included in the Western Illinois Pioneer Trail, but we decided this would make the trail too large (and dominant) in terms of engagement with the WIPT partners. Please see our powerpoint: https://uofi.box.com/s/p17lnr489k8gb67pfrugr1mjao4xkrwa
Mormontown: This is an archaeological project waiting to happen, as well as the pursuit of several other ephemeral Mormon settlements in west central Illinois for which there is family memory.
WEST FRANKFORT: Already in 1941 the Federal Works Agency described West Frankfort as one of “seven stranded coal towns” and yet the town was still booming years later – indeed, until the demise of the coal industry, largely due to EPA regulations.
GERMAN HERITAGE TOWNS: Illinois has a significant German descendant population. We originally had thought of a creating a German heritage trail through several of these places in central-southern Illinois. They are often quite lovely and on a sound economic footing and some with their own tourism sector. Therefore, we eliminated them from the project’s primary concern with community development. But here we present three that are interesting, differ from each other, and – reiterating – worth visiting: Belleville, Maeystown, Mascoutah. We also include a historical point of inflection: the lynching of Robert Paul Praeger in Collinsville in the context of strong anti-German sentiment around World War I.
CUBA, IL: The coal history of this town – particularly its stip mining – is very significant but Cuba does not easily fit the “Western Illinois Pioneer Trail” so we have isolated it. We also call attention to Cuba’s Amish population.
ERIK McDUFFIE: We call attention to this interesting project (https://africanamericanmidwest.com/pbs-documentary/) of our colleague,Dr. Erik McDuffie(Department of History, UIUC) and the AAMW multidisciplinary team beyond UIUC (https://africanamericanmidwest.com/about-aamw/). Parts of their project directly intersect interests of The Mythic Mississippi Project.