First-time Blogger also

Okay, I have no idea what to write, so I'll just talk about the same things everybody has been talking about here.

Despite the tedious reading, the textbook IS quite comprehensive, packing everything that happened in a decade into a 35-page chapter. I just wonder how much will be remembered on tests. I also agree that sometimes the book lack of mechanistic details, which was described in a previous post written by Shealyn. But what can one expect? There’re just too many stuff. Just imagine what would happen if the U.S. history is 100 years longer than it supposed to be…

On the firefighters readings, so far the both of them have been really interesting. They go into many details in many different aspects that show the evolvement of the fire service. People always say, “Our past makes who we are now”. So, it is very important to know what’s been going on back then, because most things just don’t appear magically. There has been a lot of struggling in history to shape the society we are living in now, and push for the service and utilities we now enjoy. Now that we know how things were back then, I think we must not take them for granted (sorry, when I say “we”, I meant “me”. Just in case anyone doesn’t agree with me, so he/she can exclude himself/herself automatically)

I am VERY nervous about the firefighter project. It is a very unconventional project for a class. But I agree that it is a great opportunity to train for field works, which all historians do. I wonder when we need to conduct interviews, how do we set up interview schedules with the retired firefighters (find their phone # in yellow pages and call them up randomly only to be refused or even worse to be reported to polices and having a restraining orders files against me? No? Okay, I was just kidding)? Is the Winter Park fire department involved in organizing any of those interviews? Sorry for asking stupid questions, hopefully they’ll be answered some time later in the semester.