The students read extensively about various periods in local history. At the Boston Children’s Museum, they toured the Native American object archives and considered how to tell compelling stories without written descriptions. At Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, they examined the Revolutionary collection and learned about how to organize an exhibition and write object labels. In preparation for the real-world stakes of representing both their school and the Concord Museum at a public event, the class spoke with professionals at several museums about how exhibitions are assembled. She noted that the course had been years in the making and had been possible only with the dedicated partnership of the Concord Museum and significant help from the Minuteman National Historical Park. “These students are so lucky they don’t actually quite even know it,” said CA history teacher Kim Frederick at the public event that culminated the semester’s work. The students learned how to approach the history of Concord through its objects, from household goods of its earliest European settlers to weapons from the Revolution and artifacts from Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and the Alcott family. Guided by Concord Museum curator David Wood and Susan Foster Jones, manager of school partnerships, CA students had the extraordinary opportunity to fully access one of the oldest and most treasured collections of Americana in the United States. What better place to study history than in Concord, the birthplace of the nation and the epicenter of transcendentalism and America’s literary renaissance? And what better way to engage with history’s living presence than by learning from actual objects from the past? Concordians had weapons concealed, and they were ready to follow orders.” The lesson for museum visitors: The British attack was no surprise it wasn’t luck that allowed the colonists to force a British retreat but rather how prepared they were for battle. “These weren’t farmers fresh off the fields. “An incredible spy network kept them safe,” Lucian explained. Wearing tricorn hats and clothing authentic to the period, Hank and Lucian Sharpe ’20 described the coordinated, risky maneuvers that Patriots engaged in to smuggle four British canons from within the enemy encampment on the Boston Common long before the morning of April 19, 1775. Hank Parker ’20 demonstrated historical inaccuracies in the statue, created a century after the Battle of Lexington and Concord - the Minuteman’s powder horn, for example, is held on the wrong side. history course Object Permanence: Concord and the American Nation gave public gallery talks in the new Anna and Neil Rasmussen Education Center. On May 9 at the Concord Museum, eight classmates from CA’s U.S. Inscribed on the sculpture’s base, the first stanza of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Concord Hymn” also commemorates the “embattled farmers” who fired that “shot heard round the world.” Farmers they may have been, but the notion of the local militia as militarily unsophisticated needs reexamining, according to Concord Academy students. The statue by Daniel Chester French erected at Concord’s Old North Bridge in 1875 depicts a farmer abandoning his plow to take up arms in the American War of Independence.
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