Reprint from Viewpoints, Volume 46, #1, Winter 2015.
Editor’s Note: Gale Carter’s East Chicago freshmen transcribed part of a Quaker, Yankee, spinster’s Civil War diary that included her work with self-emancipated African Americans (Contraband) around Alexandria, Virginia. Her students searched for information from various newspapers on the dates of the diary entries, and what they learned and created will become part of a museum exhibit in Alexandria. Ms. Carter took it one step further and travelled with some of her students to visit the area where the diarist lived and worked. I saw Ms. Carter’s poster session at the National Council for the Social Studies Conference in Boston, and it was quite impressive. This project is something that could be replicated for various periods in history using documents that could be obtained from libraries, online holdings, state and local history organizations or genealogy associations...the possibilities are endless. It is a unique yet simple primary source project for students.
East Chicago Central High School Studies Black History Year-round: Students’ Transcription of a Virginia Civil War Diary Carried Them on an Indiana Jones Adventure
Gale Carter, East Chicago Central High School
When Central High School teacher and History Club Sponsor Gale Carter signed a guest book at the Alexandria, Virginia Archaeology Museum, she had no idea that it would lead to a yearlong academic quest that would bring her, with students, back to that very museum.
Gale Carter routinely visits museums and signs up for their newsletters, as she did 2011 in Alexandria. She begin receiving email from the museum, most did not pique her interest, until August 21, 2013, it read ‘Volunteer Transcribers Needed for Civil War Diary Project.’ In Carter’s many years as a History student and teacher, she had never done any transcription.
A month later, Carter was back at the museum in Alexandria for a transcription training session. It was there that Carter learned the story of the author of the diary to be transcribed, Miss Julia Wilbur. Miss Wilbur was a Yankee, Quaker, spinster in her late forties when she heard of the plight of newly self-emancipated African Americans in the South called Contraband. Wilbur left her father’s comfortable home in the Rochester, New York area to volunteer in a refugee site in Washington, D.C. (she later moved to a different site in Alexandria) to assist the Contraband with their transition. Lucky for us, Julia Wilbur was a diarist. She kept diaries for fifty years. Carter was assigned to transcribe the part of one of her diaries that covered the summer of 1863. The transcriptions will be posted on the Haverford College website for public access.
After attending the training, Carter decided that her students at Central High School were not going to have to wait years, like she did, to get the opportunity to transcribe an authentic primary source document. She shared her fortune with them.
Transcription sounds pretty simple, just type the words that have been written. The diary was written in cursive and cursive is no longer emphasized in the curriculum in the U.S. Also, the words and spelling from the 1800s are different from today. Some of the print on some pages of the diary was faded. Additionally, some days Julia Wilbur was tired and her penmanship wasn’t consistently legible. All of these conditions combined to make a simple transcription assignment quite daunting for these brand new high school freshmen.
Information about the Contraband is just beginning to gain attention. They had nothing but what they could carry with them when they made their courageous escape from enslavement to Union held territory. They only had their freedom, and even that was not stable.
Once the students became engaged with the assignment, Carter took it a step further. She required the students to find the contents of other documents from the same place and time period as Wilbur’s diary and compare these documents to the diary. The ‘Chronicling America’ section of the Library of Congress website provided access to 1863 newspapers from the Alexandria area that favored each side. The tech-savvy students found more primary source documentation on other sites as well, such as period weather maps, postcard war maps. Students Matt Chandler and Tera Wallace dug up General Butler’s threat to Secesh women of New Orleans to arrest them like prostitutes if they continued to attack Union soldiers. The documents were used to make exhibits to tell Julia Wilbur’s story, page by page, day by day. The students presented the exhibit for the entire school during lunch periods and they also maintained a long term hall exhibit of the transcriptions.
Mrs. Carter collaborated with former Media Arts teacher Mr. Sanford Spann, Jr. on the project. Mr. Spann had his students interview and film Mrs. Carter’s students about their research.
Carter still was not satisfied. She had been to Alexandria. She knew that many of the sites, streets and buildings that the students had written about in their transcriptions still existed. She had seen and visited these places. She was not going to end this project until her students had the same experience.
The students began a series of fund raisers to pay for a field study trip to Virginia to see what they had written about. With the aid of some very generous donors including East Chicago Mayor Anthony Copeland, Lake County Prosecutor Bernard Carter of East Chicago, the Foundations of East Chicago, Gas Station, DBA restaurant, the Geography Educators Network of Indiana (Gale Carter is a board member), the Civil War Trust Preserve (Carter is member of its Teacher Regiment), as well as some Central High School faculty and an East Chicago resident, on June 19th, Mrs. Carter and nine students boarded a flight at O’Hare airport and two hours later landed at National Airport in our nation’s capital. Mr. Spann came to D.C. as well.
The students had a full schedule. They began with a meeting with the Vice Mayor of Alexandria. She welcomed them to her city and commended their scholarship. Then they met with archaeologists at the museum. The staff had prepared presentations for the students on the Julia Wilbur diary project and on the components of oral history. Then the students got down to the business of documenting Julia Wilbur’s life in Alexandria. Junior Media Arts student Jalen Ivory was the primary videographer and photographer. The students plan to use the footage to create a website narrating Julia Wilbur’s daily life during the Civil War for the summer of 1863.
The students also visited the African American History museum and also saw the Franklin and Armfield building where Solomon Northrup was held in captivity. Nortrup’s life is depicted in the 2014 Academy Award Movie of the Year, 12 Years a Slave. Franklin and Armfield was one of the country’s largest slave trading companies. With its strategic location connecting the city life of D.C. with the plantations of Virginia, Alexandria was second only to New Orleans as the largest slave center. Their final stop in Alexandria was the Contraband and Freedmen’s Cemetery which had just been restored after being discovered by the city archaeologist while reading some old city newspapers. The students reflected on the Contrabands life as they viewed the graves, large and small, and read the names on the new memorial, which also contained a bronze of a street map of Civil War Alexandria. The students were already very familiar with those streets and landmarks because of their research.
Since the students were in the area, their Congressman, Peter Visclosky, arranged for his staff to give the students a tour of the Capitol building. The students were able to sit in on a session of Congress. Afterward, they went on a self-guided tour of the Supreme Court and the American Indian museum.
Social Studies was not the only subject that the students studied on this trip. Under her guidance, Mrs. Carter insisted that the students learned to navigate the airports as well as the D.C. subway and bus systems. The students learned and grew from this experience in many ways, including sharing a room with a nonfamily member.
Carter was so pleased with the project that she submitted it for consideration to be presented at the 2014 National Council of Social Studies annual conference. Her proposal was accepted and she presented the project at the conference in November in Boston.
To date, the diary transcripts are posted on the City of Alexandria website with an acknowledgement of the contributions of the East Chicago Central students and other volunteer transcribers. The work of these students will stand for years and will benefit historians, researchers, professors, students and the curious public for years to come. They accomplished all of this their freshman year of high school.
You might be wondering, what are those history students working on this school year? The students hope to go to Kentucky; southern Indiana; Springfield, Illinois and finally Washington, D.C. to learn, gather, synthesize, interpret and organize facts about the conditions, motivations and innate abilities that created the man that stirred this country to split in two and then the same man was able to successfully reunite it again. The man is President Lincoln. The students have entitled this new endeavor Linking the Life of Lincoln.
You may contact Ms. Carter at .