Right Place and Right Time

Kristen Nelson modestly calls it a case of being in the right place at the right time. Yet, she was selected to travel and conduct research with Sam Wineburg, an education professor at Stanford University who is widely known for his award-winning book Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching about the Past.

Kristen was hired to assist Wineburg with his research during the summer of 2005. A senior history and women’s studies major, Kristen was recommended for the large-scale research study by the Gustavus history department faculty.

Wineburg was on the Gustavus Adolphus College campus during the spring of 2005 as a resource for the history department’s “Thinking Historically” project. He was impressed by the scope and methodology of the project and also by the history majors he encountered. Early in the summer, he contacted the department, asking the faculty to recommend students who would conduct in-the-field research.

Professor and department chair Greg Kaster recommended Kristen. At the time, she was completing work with assistant professor of political science Jill Locke on a history of women’s education between 1800 and 1830, supported by a presidential summer grant.

Within weeks of being hired, Kristen and 2005 political science and economics graduate Steven Manthie were on their way to Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Minneapolis armed with pencil and clipboard. At each location they asked “person on the street” questions designed to gauge how the public thinks about the past. They spent five days in each city collecting at least 200 surveys per site.

Kristen asked randomly selected subjects to name five famous Americans, not including presidents or their wives. Kristen noted that people over 45 years old usually named inventors and white men (e.g., Franklin, Bell, Edison) while those under 18 tended to name people associated with civil rights and other humanitarian concerns (e.g., Martin Luther King Jr.), supporting the hypothesis that different generations apply different filters to the past.

She endured a few angry and unwilling subjects, a few more suspicious ones, and also a few who wouldn’t stop talking, but she was generally encouraged by her experience.

“It was eye-opening,” said Kristen, who anticipates going on to graduate school in women’s studies or perhaps attending law school. “This applied my Gustavus education to a real-life situation. What I’ve learned at Gustavus is valuable in the outside world.”

Back on campus for her final year, Kristen is preparing her earlier research on women’s education for potential presentation at the National Conference for Undergraduate Research (NCUR), to be held this spring in Chicago.