Author: R01222558

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The Jesuits Take Moving WAY Too Seriously

Our projects are due in less than a month, and doing research has officially ascended to the level of priority number one. I have read so many letters and have had to analyze so much poor handwriting, I think my glasses need a new prescription. We are making a lot of progress, though. After compiling a list of letters exchanged between everyone involved in the Jesuit takeover, dating them, and writing a brief description to make sense of the dates, I should have enough data to start constructing a basic timeline by Saturday. James has been in and out of the Lackawanna Historical Society finding primary sources to determine Scranton’s reaction to World War II and the Jesuit takeover, and is surprisingly finding more information in the Wilkes-Barre newspaper’s archives than our own, but sources are sources.

We are feeling confident about our Clio post (which is still in the works) and our project, but it wasn’t always that way. Trying to find a landmark in Scranton that had anything to do with our topic was . . . difficult. We mulled over ideas for a few days with nothing to show for it. And then an idea came. Where did it all begin . . . for us as students anyway? Answer: the Estate. Walking around the campus is one thing, but every student starts their journey at the University of Scranton in admissions, conveniently housed in the old Victorian residency of the Scranton family. How does that relate to our project? The Jesuits began their journey their, too: they covertly moved into the Estate in June 1942, and I do mean covertly. Not even the moving truck driver was allowed to know what was going on. It’s a little much on the Jesuit’s part, but nonetheless a fun story.

When I found out our final projects had to be about the University of Scranton way back in the beginning of the semester, I was a little disappointed. Correction: I feared the impeding boredom I thought would follow researching something as niche as the University of Scranton. That isn’t the case now, though. The stories we’re uncovering are interesting and all the more relevant because we walk the grounds they unfolded on. It’s an eye-opening experience to say the least.

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Sources, Viewpoint, and Mentalite: Historical Context and Mindsets

On October 2nd we began Unit 2, which is concerned with finding sources. We also spent most of the class discussing Arnold Chapters 5 and 6. Chapter 5 was mostly focused on placing our research in a larger historical context, the three contexts being either political, social, and cultural. The political view focuses mainly on the leaders of historical events. This view can be dangerous because the preponderance of importance is placed on the “Great Men of History,” which offers a very limited, narrow point of view. The social view of history focuses on social and economic influences on history. The cultural view is based on a patterns of thought and how they affect history. What do all of these contexts have in common? They affect what sources we use. If one were to write about (as exemplified in class), the American Revolution, the sources used to write a political, social, or cultural view would be very different from one another.  Chapter 6 was mostly concerned with the term “metalité,” or different mindsets. The idea of getting into the mindset of the people from different times gives the historian a difficult task: dissociating presently held ideas to understand those of the past. This is difficult especially when deciphering primary written sources, as language has a tricky tendency to evolve over time, and some words take on different meaning (cf. “cool” or “awful”). We then reflected on what all of this information means to us. What historical context do our papers fall into? How did these contexts affect our choice of sources?