Course Title of the Day: “Dead in Virginia”

This is a wonderful idea for a history course.  Mills Kelly’s historical methods class at George Mason University requires students to do research in local graveyards.  The Washington Post reports:

George Mason University history professor Mills Kelly, by his own admission, always has liked cemeteries, in part for what they tell us about the past.

Now, he’s designed a course to get his students out among the gravestones. He calls it “Dead in Virginia.”

Looking for a new way to teach old things, Kelly requires students enrolled in the 300-level historical methods course to choose a family cemetery in or around Fairfax County and dig up as much information as they can about those buried there.

The students will post the fruits of their search – including photos, maps and descriptions of people – to MyCemetery.org, a free and open database Web site that Kelly created for the course that can be used by others who are seeking information about people who once lived, worked and died in Fairfax County and its environs.taught through writing papers,” Kelly said, which is not the goal of this course.

Students receive this “warning notice” at the top of their syllabus: “This course is not your normal historical methods course. . . . In this class you will get your hands, your shoes and probably your pants dirty.”

Kelly said he also hopes to teach his young students how to use a few old-fashioned sources of information, the kind that long have been the staple of historians abut aren’t necessarily available through the click of a mouse – newspaper archives, land records, marriage certificates and the documents created in legal disputes…

Read the rest here.

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