Bancroftiana, Number 124 Spring 2004: Students Practice History in Bancroft

Students Practice History in Bancroft

Last year, 160 students in “The Practice of History” (History R1) logged many, many hours in Bancroft, studying hundreds of old, obscure, and often fascinating documents and records relating to the history of Cal. In fact, so assiduously did they ”“practice” history, the Edward H. Heller Reading Room was filled to capacity on four successive days in April—a condition that only a few “old timers” can recall having happened in the past. What was this all about?

“The Bowl. Memorial Stadium. University of California, Berkeley, Calif.” A color postcard view of the new stadium filled to capacity, circa 1924. Views of California Memorial Stadium, 1923 - [ongoing]. UARC Pic 10D: 39.

According to the General Catalogue, the purpose of History R1 is to introduce students to historiography. Usually, the professors assign readings in standard, classical historical texts and conduct class discussions of how the authors interpreted and debated the past and how they gathered and made use of their materials and sources.

This time, Professors David Henken, Randolph Starn, and James Vernon wanted to try a different approach; they wanted their students to learn historiography literally by practicing it. The students would be assigned primary source material in areas of their own choosing and write the history the documents revealed. As the official repository of the Cal’s historical records, the University Archives in Bancroft holds tens of thousands of primary sources and, therefore, was perfect for the assignment.

Views of California Memorial Stadium, 1923 - [ongoing]. UARC Pic 10D: 40(a). Gift of Robert E. Riley, 1971.

The graduate student instructors for the course consulted their students and the Acting University Archivist to define eight research topics—one for each section—related to university history. Topics ranged from campus planning, buildings, and monuments to student scrapbooks, sports, residential life, and diversity. A selection of primary materials for each topic was placed on “Class Hold” so they could be paged for students with minimum delay. It was assumed that these preselected materials would satisfy most, if not all, the students’ need for primary sources.

Primarily freshmen and sophomores, most of the students were not familiar with primary resources, nor had they worked in a special collections library. Accordingly, the Acting University Archivist visited each section in advance of the assignment to describe the materials that had been selected for the section’s topic, and to explain library policies and procedures. Everything had been carefully planned, and at that point it looked like a routine job of supporting a course.

The students were more industrious and demanding than anticipated, however. Several showed up in the library before the section presentations, and many others stopped by the day of the first lecture. From there it snowballed; most afternoons for the rest of the month the reading room was packed. During this period the library logged a record high in use – 137 readers registered in one day, and a record 4 days with delays in reading room access because of limited seating capacity.

Student requests for additional materials were only partly the reason. Library restrictions such as the need to page materials from closed stacks or from storage and the requirement that library staff perform all photocopying work were factors. Also, the History R1 assignment coincided with assignments from two other classes requiring heavy use of Bancroft.

Operational restrictions in special collections that cause frustration and delay are important lessons the students learned. Library staff, for their part, realized the need for careful scheduling as use of the library by undergraduates increases. Staff also discussed the possibility of offering a course in the use of primary resources under the auspices of the Teaching Library.

Annual Freshman–Sophmore Pushball Contest, August 28, 1913. Scores: 17-4; 16-0. Student Scrapbooks of the University of California Students, 1878-1940. Number 6: George M. Lindsay Scrapbook, 1917.

The professors and most of the students agreed that the new course was a success. Despite the frustrations, many students experienced the intense pleasure and excitement of working with old photographs of Cal, student scrapbooks from the 19th century, or the papers of such luminaries as John Galen Howard, campus architect and first professor of architecture, and Douglas Tilden, member of a distinguished family and the disabled artist who created the famous “Football Players” sculpture near the Eucalyptus Grove and helped found the California School for the Deaf and Blind in Berkeley.

Among the comments in student evaluations were “Absolutely wonderful!” and “I really enjoyed using Bancroft; I’m glad it’s open to undergrads.” One who seemed especially to have acquired an historic consciousness wrote, “It was awesome [to] actually hold documents that were original and actually owned by the person.”

Also rewarding for staff was the gratitude of our faculty colleagues, the professors themselves, who wrote, “My colleagues and I were tremendously impressed by the willingness of the library . . . to make ‘the practice of history’ real and present for so many students.”

—David Farrell
Acting University Archivist