Blog Makeover: How Do You Touch the Past?

While trying to imagine my connection to the physical artifact of Trist’s actual diary I was inspired to redesign my blog.  I realized that in order to teach undergraduates to really understand Trist and eventually discuss how she views the landscape the animals that she encounters, I first need provide contextual documents for them to understand Trist as a real woman.  They need to see things like what she wore, how she traveled, what her diary looked like. 

So, as I prepare to add contextual to my Blog, I changed the background to an image of a weathered journal.  I also changed some of my fonts to cursive to invoke the days when cursive was a technology for writing.  Now computers, blogs, and Facebook are our technologies for keeping in touch.  However, Trist’s travel journal and her handwriting style were her technology for corresponding with her friend Thomas Jefferson.

I hope that if I can show students a peek into what it was like for Trist to travel the frontier , they will better understand how early Euroamericans viewed the environment and animals.

~Blake