The Experience of the Hungerford History Harvest

The History Harvest provides a way for microhistories of a city to come to life and have them be remembered. The goal of this project is “to collect, preserve, and digitize the people’s history” (Thomas & Jones, 327). In addition to this public history, The History Harvest provides a mode of learning for both undergraduate and graduate students that is much more hands-on that also allows them to expand their academic CV early in their history careers. It allows for “’authentic learning’” with the benefit of developing “important skills, including ‘synthetic ability’ to recognize patterns, ‘’patience’ to follow long arguments, and ‘flexibility’ to work across disciplinary and cultural boundaries.” (Thomas & Jones, 328). As a result, “students undergo a profound transformation in their understanding of history and its meaning, and develop a range of potential future professional pathways.” (Thomas & Jones, 329).

My experience with the History Harvest for Hungerford was short being that I came in late. However, I did have the opportunity to interview Jared Freedline about his experience. When asked about the planning of event, he told me that they began planning in the summer of 2023, present his/their plan to Dr. Lester, and fill out a lot of pre-panning paperwork; his biggest support was getting help from others such as Dr. French’s student in the HIS5925: History in the Digital Age. He described his experience actually doing the project on Saturday, Nov. 18th, as originally overwhelming, because the event had more people than originally planned, however once he got into the groove of things he said it was beautiful to see so many coming out to support local history. Jared spent a lot of time pre-planning this event and created a detailed hands-on workshop/training for the graduate students that were participating in the event. He believes that once we begin this event for the Zora! Festival this Spring, he is even more prepared and excited to be involved with it. When asked what he wants to do differently with the next event, he said he would like to plan even more.

When asked about the most interesting experience he got from this event, he said that conducting interviews and hearing the stories of so many different people and learning history from a personal perspective, especially one of a “dying” history, was fascinating and was a blessing to experience. He loves that he is a part of something that is allowing more voices to be heard in the Hungerford area. I finished off the interview by asking a “so what?” question. I said, why is this event important? Why are we doing this? His response was that because this is considered a “dying” history, conducting these interviews allow us historians to be able to make their stories come to life and have their histories told as they should be, not just in the negative ways that we discuss in terms of it dying out.

In conclusion, I believe the Hungerford History Harvest event was a success and allowed for more people’s stories to be heard. So many histories of the last one-hundred years have been silenced for various reasons and conducting interviews to hear these stories come to life allow for historians to preserve these stories and provide future historians with first-hand accounts [primary sources]. The more we create events like these in various areas, the more history we can preserve for future historians. One things Jared also mentioned is we should advertise even more so that we can get even more people coming in. He was already thinking of new ways to advertise and get word out there for the next event at the Zora! Festival.