History

Field Trips

The history department tries to maximize opportunities for students to interact with the history they are studying directly. Most of these opportunities occur through internships or archival research, but for some classes, this interaction takes the form of field trips that one might not traditionally associate with the study of history.

Field Trip

Nicolas Proctor’s American Environmental History course includes several field trips, which are tied to different readings in the course. In the midst of reading and discussing William Rathje and Cullen Murphy’s Rubbish! The Archaeology of Garbage, the class visits the Metro Park East Landfill – the destination for most of the solid waste in greater Des Moines. After reading some essays by Aldo Leopold, the class visits the Neal Smith National Wildlife Refuge, which is an ambitious project to restore thousands of acres of Iowa farmland to tallgrass prairie.

These trips are extremely interesting, but most students feel that the most amazing field trip the class goes on is to a pork processing facility in Waterloo, Iowa, which is owned by Tyson Foods. We make this visit while we are reading Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal. The visit involved a long drive, hair nets, lab coats, hard hats, and a lot of blood. We toured the entire facility and had the opportunity to talk with a number of employees.

The trip to Waterloo showed me a world I had only heard of. This was more powerful than words. To see the production line put all those images I had into reality.

Justin Schneider

I had heard of what goes on at such places and the timing couldn’t have been more perfect. It helped me to finally understand what goes on in a meat packing plant versus what others always say. It dispelled a few of the myths, but some things had been right. Also, it timed well with the chapter about it is Schlosser. I don’t believe that the material would have been quite so interesting had we not gone.
Karmin Stonehocker

Last Updated: 11/18/11