Lecturer makes history come to life for UM students

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ORONO – Betty Duff isn’t your typical graduate student. And the American history course she is teaching at the University of Maine isn’t your typical undergraduate course.

Duff is a genuine coal-miner’s daughter from Harlan County, Kentucky. She has worked as a professional jazz singer in Philadelphia.

And she’s 62 years old and didn’t start college until she was 49 and had sent all four of her own children to college.

Duff is completing her doctorate in history at UMaine, and serving as the department’s John J. Nolde lecturer.

The Nolde lectureship is awarded annually to a graduate student, with the recipient teaching a course under the loose supervision of a member of the history department faculty.

Duff says the lectureship has given her the chance to “teach in my own way.”

“I believe a teacher helps students to learn, rather than teaches them. So I use an interactive approach, rather than lecturing,” she said. “I want to make it exciting, and living.”

To that end, Duff devotes only about 15 minutes of each class period to lecturing. Then she facilitates a class discussion or allows her students to form discussion groups.

She also has assigned a project in which students must use both primary and secondary sources to research a topic in American history from pre-Colonial times until 1877.

Duff especially has encouraged her students to pursue topics in Maine history.

The students who have done so, Duff said, have undertaken projects in researching the history of their hometowns, the timber industry, American Indians or landmarks such as Portland Head Light.

Some students have discovered they may be writing a first-ever history of their hometown. And they are developing a new-found pride in the places from which they came.

Other projects with a Maine focus include histories of Caribou, Dexter, Fairfield, Fort Kent, Houlton, Old Town, Waterville, the Moosehead region and the Battle of Hampden.

The students were to present the results of their research in class earlier this month. Duff also hopes to collect their written work for a booklet that could be housed in the special collections section at Fogler Library.

Duff said her own childhood in Appalachia allowed her to identify with her students from rural Maine.

She said she believes the research projects have helped her students to appreciate their roots.

“Growing up in Appalachia at the time when I did, girls didn’t go to college,” Duff recalled. “When I graduated high school, I had no choice but to go to the city, Indianapolis, to work. It was a trauma. People made fun of my accent.

“I have a lot of students from northern Maine, and at the beginning of the year they would say in a kind of disparaging tone, ‘I’m from Houlton,’ or ‘I’m from Fort Kent.’ Now I see a lot of pride in those students,” she said.

“The first thing they gain is respect for their ancestors who settled in such remote areas. They realize they come from strong, sturdy stock and have nothing to be ashamed of,” she said.

There are 25 students from a variety of majors taking Duff’s course, History of the United States to 1877.

Duff said the mix of students from different academic disciplines enriches the discussion.

Those who are not history majors say the course has helped them enjoy the subject.

Krista Plourde of Caribou certainly thinks so. She made a startling discovery when she began researching her hometown.

She is a descendant of a founding family of Caribou, the Cochrane family that immigrated from Ireland.

“That made it a lot more interesting,” Plourde said.

Plourde, a junior majoring in public administration, said she has taken courses before that required primary source research.

But it was particularly interesting, she said, to search the Caribou library for census documents, journal entries and old books about the place where she grew up.

Plourde also researched the impact of the railroad and farming in the community.

Caribou was not incorporated as a city until 1869. Before that, it was a series of small settlements with names like Linden, Forestville and Letter H.

“I’d be reading,” Plourde said, “and the text would name a spot and I’d think, ‘I know where that is.’ At one point I thought, ‘Oh, that’s my house,'” she said.

Plourde wishes that she had been able to invest more of her research time in Caribou.

“I wish I could have spent more time up there. There’s a lot of information in the town library,” she said. “Sometimes [writing] a research paper can be dry, but this was interesting and enjoyable.”

Katie Malcolm of Cumberland, a sophomore who plans to major in journalism with a concentration in advertising, said her research on the history of Portland Head Light has taught her that studying history can be fun.

“This is my first history course in college. I always thought history was boring – something that was read out of a book,” Malcolm said.

Her research has led her to visit the museum at the Portland Head Light, where she received a tour of the lighthouse and took photographs she will incorporate in a Power Point demonstration for the class.

Malcolm also has read biographies and other primary source documents about Joseph Greenleaf and the Strout family, who were among the first to work as the lighthouse’s keepers.

She said that Duff’s assignment gave her the extra motivation she needed to investigate the lighthouse, a landmark she associates with her childhood.

“Portland Head Light always fascinated me,” Malcolm said. “My aunt came from North Carolina every year to visit, and her biggest pleasure was to go to Portland Head Light and get lobster. To her it was the epitome of Maine.”

When Duff encouraged the students to choose research which interested them, “I jumped at the opportunity,” Malcolm said.

It is also the first college history course for Joe Poulin of Oakland, a senior majoring in mechanical engineering technology.

Poulin took on the responsibility of coordinating the schedule of Power Point presentations for the day the students presented their research.

His own project explores the equipment and tools used in the Maine timber industry from 1820 to1877.

Poulin’s work has included reading primary source documents such as business ledgers in the special collections at University of Maine’s Fogler Library, and photographing tools in the Page Farm and Home Museum.

He said it was the first research project he has done using primary source materials.

“Researchwise, I’ve never done a project like that before,” Poulin said. “It’s given me a new perspective.

“It’s been most interesting looking through collections in the library, trying to decipher the old handwriting,” he said.

Research topics that do not focus on Maine include women’s roles in the abolition movement, medicine and surgery, Samuel Colt, media coverage in the Colonies and England, the Boston Massacre, the Lewis and Clark expedition, life on the Oregon Trail, slavery, Remington rifles, the battles of Lexington and Concord, the origins of the Ku Klux Klan, and Asian immigration.

Duff began her college career with a psychology course at Delaware County Community College in Media, Pa.

A professor there encouraged her to pursue an undergraduate degree, which she earned in 1992 from Widener University in Chester, Pa. She entered the master’s program in English at UMaine in 1993 and moved from there to doctoral work in history.