Course description for

One Day in New York City

Eileen Scully

January 25, 1929—this was not a day of any grand consequence in the scheme of time and history. What was this lived day like for an individual living in New York City? What difference to that day’s demands and experiences arose from the fact of this individual’s gender, race, age, heritage, location in the city? How were these individual experiences on this one day the same or at odds with experiences 50, 100, 200 years earlier? What changes came in daily routines over the next five decades? What was “democratic” in the thinking, doing, routines, expectations, and frustrations of this individual? Using an experimental “one day” methodology for exploring larger histories, the course engages readings from a variety of disciplines and time periods. Written work (exposition, analysis, first-person historically grounded fiction), independent term projects (individual or collaborative), presentations to the group, and field trips are expected.

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It’s not often that you hear a historian say that she wants to “break the grip of chronology.” Isn’t that the way history happens, after all? One thing after another?

In one sense, yes. But historian and Bennington faculty member Eileen Scully thought there had to be a better way to teach history—not only to convey the events and ideas of a given historical period, but to teach students how to think and work as historians do.

“Paradoxically, students get chronology better from this ‘one day’ approach.”

In her One Day in New York City class, Scully started with a single day—January 25, 1929, “not a day of any grand consequence in the scheme of time and history”—and used it as a pivot point for unearthing the reality of life in that time and place. Through primary documents, field trips to New York City, and a host of in-class and independent projects, her students reconstructed the lives of everyday people as they would have unfolded on that day, encountering larger social and political movements and historical events along the way.

Scully explains: “The ‘One Day in…’ idea emerged as a possible way to break the grip of chronology, given how clear it had become that there’s no traction for ‘this happened, and then this happened, and—wait—hold on to your seats, the second thing happened BECAUSE OF that first thing.’… Paradoxically, students get chronology better from this ‘one day’ approach than they do when timelines organize the semester.”

Instead of simply filling in blanks, students were learning to write history.

“The things she had us doing,” says Ileasa Green ’10, who took the course, “are things I never would have expected to do. In one class, she brought in huge sheets, and had us map out the streets of Manhattan and actually track the people we were studying as they moved throughout the city.”

And who were these people they were tracking? “Before the class started,” Scully said, “I got the idea to go to the 1930 U.S. census for Manhattan, and locate people with the same or very similar names as the students registered for the course.” Given the diversity of New York City, she was able to find people with the same surnames for nearly every student. The individuals in those census entries became the students’ “census buddies,” and the class spent the first half of the term reconstructing what their lives may have been like. Instead of simply filling in blanks, the students were learning to write history.

But how do you discover, for example, what a literate-but-unemployed, African American widow living in Brooklyn in 1929 would have been doing at 7 am on a given weekday morning? Combine research with imagination. Census data, newspaper articles from the time, Library of Congress online exhibitions, and histories of the late 1920s all provided details. Genealogy websites were another rich resource. “Academics seem to think that Ancestry.com is just about looking for great grandma,” Scully says. “They are missing much.”

“We went to the site of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, near Washington Square Park…. We went to a speakeasy.”

Students also tied the lives of their census buddies to major events of the early twentieth century. The class read extensive primary sources on the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911, and then tried to figure out where their census buddies would have been in relation to that event. They drew connections to labor legislation and work conditions of the time. And then they went to see the landmarks in person.

“Eileen actually arranged for some Bennington alums to take us around New York City and tell us about the history,” Green says. “We went to the site of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, near Washington Square Park…. We went to a speakeasy. It didn’t look like anything from the outside, just this rundown place, but when you walked in, there was this very small, dense, old-school pub with literature and historical artifacts on the walls. It was just awesome.”

The second trip to New York City was more open, allowing students to do their own research and site visits. This was in keeping with the goal of the second half of the term: Students left the census buddies behind, and used the framework of their final projects to pursue their particular interests. Green, whose focus at Bennington is psychology, literature, and dance, chose to focus on dance in the 1920s. Another student, whose ancestor had ended up in an asylum with postpartum depression, used her final project to research the history of asylums, women and medicine.

“There is something uniquely compelling, transforming, instructional and quietly humanizing about looking for a very specific person.”

The sense that you are working alongside your teachers, making discoveries together, is one of the advantages of studying history alongside a practicing historian. “I would write a two page narrative,” Green says, “and Eileen would write back 10 pages of information, possible thoughts to explore, things she’d noticed…. Her philosophy is that we’re both learning.”

Scully is, in fact, currently using the same techniques she’s teaching her students. At the moment, she is researching a particular person at the center of a biography she’s writing: “an African American woman descended from Virginia slaves, born outside of Rochester, NY, in 1842, who ended up a ‘pauper lunatic’ in Hong Kong’s Victoria Gaol.”

“First, there’s the lure of the puzzle,” Scully says, “the mystery, the out-witting—yes, I found you, so there! But, at some point, you start to look at the people around the ‘person of interest.’” And in the end, she finds that her students discover the same thing that she has discovered. “For almost all students,” Scully says, “there is something uniquely compelling, transforming, instructional and quietly humanizing about looking for a very specific person.”

Eileen Scully received the American Historical Association's 2005 Eugene Asher Prize for Distinguished Teaching. Nominated by several Bennington students, Scully received the prize at the AHA annual convention in Philadelphia on January 6, 2006.

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