This July, over a hundred rising high school seniors from throughout the state arrived at West Virginia University for the Governor’s Honors Academy, a two-week summer residential program that aims to stimulate and support excellence in education for incoming high school seniors who are residents of West Virginia. Fifteen of them had the opportunity to spend quality time in the WVRHC for a week-long course titled “The Earth in the Archive.”
Governor’s Honors Academy students dig in to their assignment.
The academy keeps students busy with activities, field trips, and many courses taught by faculty from throughout WVU’s colleges. Here in the WVRHC, we were able to offer an experience unique to WVU and unlike anything these students had done before. To connect to this year’s academy theme of Appalachia Envisioned, “The Earth in the Archive” highlighted WVRHC collections that relate to the environment.
The environment intersects with many areas of West Virginia history in which students can make connections between the past and future of Appalachia — industry and labor, politics and government, activism and conservation, recreation and agriculture, and natural and man-made disasters, to name a few. The intention was for students to find something compelling or relatable within the collections, regardless of whether their interests were more inclined to the humanities or to the sciences.
Meeting four times over the course of the week, students practiced the foundational skills of archival research. They learned to distinguish between primary and secondary source material, using examples from the WVRHC’s collection. They learned to read a finding aid and find the folders that contained the items they wanted to see. Together, we practiced historical analysis skills on a 1903 letter from a lumber company account book: finding date and location information, considering creator and recipient, and even puzzling out some messy cursive handwriting.
Having covered some of the basics, students had time to explore as we asked them to consider what particular primary sources could tell us about the relationship between people and the earth. From a pool of 20 possible primary sources, students were encouraged to spend time with whatever material they found compelling.
The students chose primary sources such as a speech given at a coal industry conference in the 1980s, an outdoor sports and recreation magazine from the 1930s, a calendar of artwork created by labor activists in the 1970s, and an illustrated poem about a chemical spill from the 2010s. They shared the ways they found words from past familiar to their lives, or surprising and confusing, and they shared their agreements and disagreements with historical perspectives.
Four class sessions went by quickly, but students finished the course with hands-on experience interpreting primary sources, an understanding of what resources may be available to them at WVU and other institutions, and practical guidance for future academic research.
The WVRHC also reached academy students beyond the course, supporting one-time visits from three other academy courses and displaying materials from the Katherine Johnson, Mathematician Papers at a “Hidden Figures” movie night.
It was truly rewarding to introduce the possibilities of archival research to young students and to learn from their inquiries and discoveries.