Homeschool AP US History: A Family Field Trip to the Levi and Catharine Coffin House

 

Can I still call it a homeschool field trip if there's only one homeschooler in attendance?

Sadder question: will I still be able to call it a homeschool field trip when there are NO more homeschoolers in attendance? SOB!

For the moment, though, it's eyes forward, because I have one homeschooler in attendance, and that homeschooler is taking a deep dive into the Underground Railroad.

The worst thing about the AP history courses is they absolutely FLY through the material. The older kid's AP European History study crammed information into her so quickly that we had very little time to build context and make real-world connections, and to be honest, it shows in her middling retention of the material five years later.

I've addressed that problem with my younger kid by, in the case of her World History course, abandoning AP altogether and instead creating our own study, laser-focused on Ancient History, from the recommended college textbooks, and in the case of this AP US History course, focusing very little on exam prep and using that extra time to enjoy more immersive studies of select topics.

Such as the Underground Railroad! The kid has long been interested in the experiences of the freedom seekers on the Underground Railroad (thank you, Addy Walker!), and thankfully, located as we are in southern Indiana, we're within driving distance of several locations important to freedom seekers and relevant to the history of enslavement on American soil. 

But somehow, until Winter Break, we'd never been to the Grand Central Station of the Underground Railroad itself, the Levi and Catharine Coffin House!

Possibly because it's low-key in the middle of nowhere, but oh, well--that's why we bought a car with excellent fuel efficiency!

Catharine and Levi Coffin were Quakers, who moved to the Quaker community of Newport (it's now called Fountain City, but I didn't get around to asking why) in 1826. From then until they moved to Cincinnati in 1847, their work assisting freedom seekers on the journey north was an open secret. They evaded bounty hunters who knew there was something going on but could never catch them, and just in case they were caught, they never knew more than one other connection of the Underground Railroad in either direction.

The museum next to the house is just one gallery, but it has some really thoughtful exhibits. I really liked this recreation of the box that Henry Brown shipped himself within:

And we have a pair of shoes from William Bush, handed down through generations of descendants. I LOVE personal artifacts like these, and I think this is an example of why these smaller museums are so important. The bigger museums of the world, the Smithsonians and the American Museums of Natural History and the British Museums, have millions more objects than they know what to do with, so the only stuff that gets displayed is the canonical stuff, the stuff most vital to the understanding of the most people.

But smaller museums can show items that are not so much exemplars of the type, but are more personal, intimate, and meaningful to the local community that the museum serves. I might not give this pair of shoes a second glance if I was looking at them in a Smithsonian museum, nor would they probably be placed on display there, competing, as they would be, with thousands of other similar artifacts in better condition or belonging to better-known people. But knowing that these shoes came from a person involved in the history of this exact place, who worked here, was buried here, and whose descendants still partly live here, is always just the absolute most awesome feeling.

One thing that I didn't love about this museum was the noise level. While I was trying to read the sign below, there were at least two--maybe even three?--other audio things going on in the same gallery, all talking over each other. It might not even be noticeable if the gallery was full of people, but it was just the four of us rattling around in there, and I found the noise level nearly unbearable, yikes!

This map is interesting, though, because these paths to freedom look like they make a point of dodging around that entire south-central area where I live:

It would have been all forests and caves and small towns and pioneer settlements, so I don't get it. Must do more research!

Here's another cool map, this one of the town of Newport. I thought it was interesting that Levi Coffin actually owns a few pieces of property on this map. One is a store that sold only goods manufactured using free labor, but I forgot to ask what that really big piece of property on the far left of the map was. Dang it!

Our guided tour of the actual house was super interesting, and I didn't take more than a couple of photos only because I was too busy stumbling all over myself to pepper the tour guide with question after question. She wasn't prepared to speak about the artifacts in the house, all of which were of the correct era and had been donated by locals (inspiring SO MANY QUESTIONS in my heart!), or really much about the building and architecture of the house itself, but she was very game to answer all of my other questions about local law enforcement, the professions and later lives of the Coffin children and further descendants, the chain of ownership of the home after the Coffins and how it became a museum site, the possible education/literacy level of Catharine Coffin, speculation about what it would look like to make this historic house ADA compliant, what the neighbors might have known about what the Coffins were doing, the general information structure of an Underground Railroad chain, where the kitchen garden might have been located, the actual division of labor regarding caring for freedom seekers (mostly relating to my theory that Catharine did far more hands-on work than Levi did), etc.

This awesome little door, below, looks like it would lead to a little closet, and could easily be hidden by just stacking a couple of boxes or a bed against it, but it leads to a storage area that extends the entire length of that room. People could hide in it if the Coffins thought they were about to be raided. All four of us got a turn to crawl inside and look around:

I also really love this spring-fed cistern. There was no reference to it in any of Coffin's papers, and no physical evidence of it when the house came into the custody of the Indiana State Museum. Excavations uncovered it by surprise. 

It's theorized that the Coffins could use this cistern to collect part of the household water, in addition to the creek that they also used just a few yards from the house. That way, no matter how many people were inside the house, anyone spying on them from the outside would only see people going to the creek to fetch a perfectly normal amount of water perfectly suited to the number of official residents inside the Coffin house:

This was a really great museum and house tour, really interesting and really accessible to a wide range of interests and abilities. We were all completely engaged and fascinated, and afterwards, we spent a very late lunch at the Big Boy and a very dull two-hour car ride back home gossiping about it. I've not also got the Reminiscences of Levi Coffin on my bookshelf, and you know I cannot keep what I'm reading to myself AT ALL so I'm sure we'll all spend even more time gossiping about it in the next few weeks!

Here are a few other things that my teenager and I have done in support of her Underground Railroad study:

• audiobook and discussion of 12 Years a Slave
• trip to the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center

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I Read Twelve Years a Slave, and Now I'm Going to Go Spit on Edwin Epps' Grave

I read a bunch of these one-star Goodreads reviews to the family, and we were simultaneously horrified and howling with laughter. People are so hilariously awful!

Twelve Years a Slave by Solomon Northup
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

My teenager and I have been listening to this book together as part of her AP US History study, usually listening for an hour or so at a time... but this last time, we listened to two and a half hours together, all the way to the end, in the audiobook equivalent of not being able to put it down because it was so exciting!

The teenager chose this book over both Uncle Tom’s Cabin and other possible slave narratives because, frankly, it was the shortest. I'd never read it before, and neither of us have seen the film, so we both came to it fresh. I was interested to see what each of us thought about it, she who's read several children's fictional accounts (shout-out to Addy Walker!) and YA histories about US slavery but nothing this graphic or wrenching, and me who's read fairly widely on the subject, but almost entirely in college classes. We've taken a lot of road trips to Civil War sites, but shamefully few to sites where we could learn about the enslaved. 

Spoiler Alert: OMG this book is EPIC. It is INCREDIBLE. It is distressing, and action-heavy, and suspenseful, and sad. It has vivid characters who I can't get out of my head, villains whose graves should be spat upon, heroes who should have statues made and scholarships founded in their honor, and victims who bring to life the vile nature of enslavement.

Like, seriously. I was shocked at how good this book is! Because it's for my teenager's history course I was prepared to read it even if it was dry or boring or we just didn't enjoy it--I mean, it's school, that's kind of what it's known for! So I was shocked and thrilled that this book is genuinely good, genuinely exciting, genuinely interesting. I saw some people in other reviews griping about having to learn all about how to pick cotton in the book and they didn't like learning about it and thought it was boring. I mean, though... it's high-key NOT?!? If you don't pick cotton right, or don't pick enough of it, you get your ass kicked! And then get your ass kicked more the next day when you can't pick even that much on account of you're injured from getting your ass kicked! And if you're female, you're also getting raped on the regular, and then when the enslaver's wife finds out that her husband is serially raping you, you get your ass kicked for that, too. That... doesn't feel boring to me. It feels uncomfortable, which I'm guessing is what the negative reviewers are actually not liking about Northup's memoir.

Everyone should read this book, and I'd say that ideally they should read it in high school. It's pretty graphic, but the graphic scenes are terrible in the way that graphic scenes ought to be, in that they're in service of telling a very important story. It's not boring, unless you're just completely uninterested in learning about any type of life different from your own. And it's a living testament to the value of human life and the importance of those who give service to help others.

Under the theme of Some People are Incredible but Other People are Terrible, here is a gross bit of backlash to Northup's memoir: 163 years after the publication of Twelve Years a Slave, a person unaffiliated with any academics at all wrote and published a book (through the small press that she owns and serves as the editor, designer, and proofreader for) entitled 200 Years a Fraud, in which she claims that Northup lied about the events of the book? That does make some of the other one-star reviews that were a lot more racist, revisionist, and conspiracy theory-forward make more sense. Here's an excellent series of rebuttals to that very weird book, including some primary source evidence of its veracity.

I was so invested in this book that after the teenager and I finished it, I went on a deep-dive to learn more about Northup's life afterwards. Unfortunately, by all accounts, Northup did not cope well with his trauma upon his return to freedom. His mother had died during his incarceration, and the seven-year-old daughter he'd left greeted him as a 19-year-old woman who introduced him to the newborn son she'd named "Solomon." Northup spent time as a speaker on the abolitionist circuit, and, of course, helping author his book, and became famous enough that during the Civil War, Union soldiers who traveled through that Louisiana area sometimes sought the plantations were Northup had been held. They sent back news of this in their letters, so happily we know that Patsey, the woman who'd been repeatedly raped, and at least once beaten almost to death, by Epps, had left earlier in the war and so had at least survived long enough to achieve freedom. 

I wish we also knew what happened to the small child Emily, daughter of Eliza, who had also been held with Northup in Washington, DC. She wasn't sold onward to Louisiana but was instead retained to be forced into sex work. 

Census records tell that Northup and his wife often separated, and eventually official record loses track of him entirely. It was rumored that he suffered from alcoholism, and was likely often unhoused, as Anne Northup's obituary refers to him as a "worthless vagabond." I am so sad that this was not a happy ending!

This is a better ending: The Hollywood Reporter collected portraits of 46 of Solomon Northup's direct descendants. I LOVE this!

There are two more happy stories: that of Dr. Sue Eakin, the historian responsible for publishing a new edition of Northup's memoir and bringing his biography into prominent academic light, and that of Samuel Bass, the Canadian who successfully got actionable information to Northup's family and lawyer and was directly responsible for Northup's rescue. When my teenager and I listened to this book together, one of our favorite parts is when Bass is discussing why he'd put himself in so much danger to help Northup. He says that he wants to do this good deed so that later in life he can think about what he did and feel good about it. I mean... FAIR! 

We don't know what happened to Northup at the end of his life, but we know the entire biographies and final resting places of his enslavers (because of COURSE we do, sigh...). You can actually still visit the house that Northup was forced to help build for Edwin Epps--it's currently on the LSUA campus! I high-key love how people are using the memorial page for Epps' Find a Grave entry to roast him, and I'm definitely not NOT going to make a point of looking him up and spitting on his grave if I ever happen to be in the area, although I will probably gag myself trying and then end up barfing all over his grave because spitting is so nasty.

I guess barfing would be better anyway?

My teenager and I listened to this book together as inter-disciplinary work for her AP US History and AP English Literature and Composition studies. For a high school student, there are some excellent extension activities to add more meat and rigor for these studies, in particular. For students who need more practice writing about literature, or in using close reading as evidence for implications, I really like the reading/writing prompts at Edsitement. 

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries (where I promise I NEVER spit on graves!), handmade homeschool high school studies, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Alchemy: A High School Chemistry/Geometry/World History Combo Study

We use CK-12's Chemistry for High School textbook as the teenager's spine for Honors Chemistry, with, of course, our own lab component added and a LOT of supplementation. 

We started supplementing right in Chapter 1, when we added a short study of alchemy to the textbook's brief history of chemistry.

I think that most teenagers find the concept of alchemy interesting--it's mystical and a little spooky, and it's very, very incorrect. Teenagers have SO much fun learning about adults who were incorrect!

Unfortunately, there really aren't a ton of great resources about alchemy that work well for a high school/undergrad readership, and there are a TON of contemporary, fantastical, and otherwise ahistorical resources that muddy up any kind of student-led research. 

Therefore, this study of alchemy was necessarily a short one, able to be completed within 1-2 hours. You could draw out the art component further, of course, by requiring a more polished piece that used a larger vocabulary of alchemical symbols and moves, but this brief afternoon's work was enough for our own purposes.

After reading the relevant material in the CK-12 Chemistry for High School textbook, my teenager and I watched this Crash Course History of Science episode (if your student isn't studying History of Science as a discrete topic, I highly recommend reviewing the playlist and adding applicable videos to their science/history syllabi as interdisciplinary enrichment):

Crash Course videos tend to be meaty, so it might be worth going over it a couple of times to make sure you absorb all the info.

After the video, my teenager and I looked through a number of alchemical illustrations and excerpts from alchemy books from alchemy's heyday. This Getty Research Institute's virtual exhibit is a treasure! Click on the link in the caption of most of the images to be taken to the digitized version of that book, which you can then flip through to find other interesting images and text. 

The teenager practiced her close reading to notice all the details in each piece of artwork, and used semiotic analysis to attempt to interpret the pieces. But also take time to notice how lovely each piece, is, as well; alchemy artwork is ART!

Using these pieces and some reference books, we then spent some time playing around with creating our own artwork that had (or looked like it had, lol!), alchemical meaning. The nature of the pieces also meant that the teenager could use the works she created as process pieces in her geometry art portfolio: 

Check out the accurate geometric shapes and the overall balance of the piece! DON'T check out my noisy digitization of the work; I really need to learn how to clean up art when I scan it, sigh...

That was as far as we took this particular lesson, but here's some further reading appropriate for an interested high school student:

• Alchemy: The Great Secret. This is a fairly accessible history for those who watched the Crash Course video but would like to learn more.
• Alchemy: An Illustrated A to Z. I wouldn't use this as a textbook supplement, but it was an excellent art reference. 
• Alchemy and Mysticism: The Hermetic Museum. Most of the text was beyond me, but it has tons of art to reference.

My favorite thing about alchemy is how it sits just next to being correct; like, they were wrong about the Sun and the Moon and dragon's blood and the mystical marriage of lead and tin, but while they were drawing their allegorical wedding feasts and busily melting silver in little pots, they were butting up against the actual chemistry that alchemy would evolve into. What they did reads now as adorably naive just because we know better, but these people were actually pretty bad-ass wizard scientists.

They also for sure all had lead poisoning, which explains a LOT of their artwork.

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Day 10 in England, Part 2: Stonehenge

 

After plane tickets, the first thing that I booked for our England trip were these tickets for access to the interior of Stonehenge--right off the top of the budget, with everything else filled in around it. It's what I was most excited about, a truly once-in-my-lifetime-so-far experience, and I'm just gonna go ahead and tell you right now that it was EVERYTHING I'd hoped it would be. As in, I'd hoped that it would be the most magical experience of my life, the most awesome thing I've ever done, the most special family activity anyone could ever plan, and I'd take the absolute most coolest photos there, and I'd marvel at the size of the stones and the mystery of their purpose and their construction and I would have SO. MUCH. FUN. 

Goal achieved!

We drove straight to Stonehenge from Avebury, and arrived exactly on time. With these evening tickets, you're allowed onto the site an hour before it closes so you can explore the museum, but the site actually closes to day ticket entries two hours before it officially closes, so we had to show our booking to get past the blockade... which may have given all the cars behind us hope, as they all stopped trying to turn around before the blockade and instead got in line behind us and made the security guard have to turn each of them away personally, oops. 

One hour was NOT enough time to see the Stonehenge museum, but I was able to make myself stare at everything more quickly than I usually like to stare at everything, so I managed.

My favorite part of the museum was this set of sculptures that showed Stonehenge during its various stages of construction. It was used from the Mesolithic period, perhaps around 8000 BCE based on radiocarbon dating of giant posts that were constructed then, through the Middle Bronze Age, perhaps around 1600 BCE. For that entire time, people were changing up Stonehenge--adding stones and ditches and barrows and pits, moving stones to different locations, carving the stones, burying people and things, etc. Below is a sculpture of Stonehenge at what was probably its most elaborate formation, around 2500 BCE. In the middle is a horseshoe of five giant trilithons, encircled by a ring of 30 sarsen stones topped with lintels. There's a double row of smaller bluestones standing between the two sets, and some of those bluestones have evidence that something was also on top of them--more lintels, perhaps? More sarsens, now called the Station Stones, were arranged singularly at various points, including that one lying in front of the tallest trilithon.

Important note: I didn't frame the compass rose in my photo, but north isn't at the top. The winter solstice sunset is at the top!

And here's Stonehenge as it looks today. There's a terrific aerial photo in Stonehenge: Making Sense of a Prehistoric Mystery, in which you can actually see the location of the missing stones as "parchmarks," or brown spots, in the grass. The existence of a giant standing stone changed the soil composition so the grass doesn't grow as nicely there!

I got the compass rose in this one! North points right-ish.

Here's another excellent map of Stonehenge, with links that give you a close-up view of every individual stone.

The entire area around Stonehenge was clearly significant, as well, and the museum had an excellent large-screen film that showed the various dates of construction of all the various barrows and cursi and henges in the region, many of which you can still visit, and some of which are on English Heritage property. 

Happily, the outdoor part of the museum (and the gift shop!) remained accessible after Stonehenge closed to day ticket holders, so I was able to keep myself entertained by exploring how the Neolithic peoples around Stonehenge might have lived:

Here are some of the other important sites in the area.

Finally, an hour after the museum closed to day ticketholders, 30 of us got on a bus with our guide to drive across the site to Stonehenge. Included in our group was another family with kids, various tourists from other countries and across the UK, a couple who'd brought several instruments that they wanted to film each other playing within the stones, and a large group, maybe half of the total, who wanted to stand in a circle and meditate and chant together inside the stones. 

One thing that I didn't realize until our bus arrived at the site is that you can actually get a pretty good view of Stonehenge for free. The A303 drives right past it, complete with congested traffic since everyone slows down to look, and there's another small road--Willoughby Road, I think?--that intersects the site, with a walking path to a viewing point that's just outside the fenced-in area.

Also? People were living on the side of this road! There were a couple of permanent tents, and a bunch of campers, all along the roadside, where they just live within sight of Stonehenge. This is very historically accurate, actually, as archaeological evidence points to some type of community that lived around Stonehenge at various times during its original prominence.

I was taking a photo of the Stonehenge Cursus, but you can see a few of the tents and campers on Willoughby Rd. There were a ton more to the left of the frame.

Here's my view of the overall Stonehenge site while we got our lecture on not touching or climbing on the stones:

It was incredibly hard to stay oriented, but I think we're standing southwest of the stones.

We're northwest of the stones, I think. Later, when I'm taking photos of everyone silhouetted by the sunset, I'll be framing them either within that inner trilithon with the narrow gap, or within that sarsen stone with the intact lintel. We're only about a month out from the Summer Solstice!

Selfie mode! I'm a little southeast of Stonehenge, with the tallest standing stone that was once part of the center trilithon of the Horseshoe over my left shoulder. 

Lecture internalized, we were set free to step over the fencing and walk as we wished among the stones!

Trilithon, with a sarsen and its lintel behind it. 

I'm off-center, but this is a view from the center of Stonehenge, through the intact parts of the sarsen circle, to the Heel Stone that marks the location of sunrise on the Summer Solstice. To get the perfect view of the sunrise, you'd want to frame the Heel Stone through the center opening, not the left one as I've done.

I think she's looking at the remaining standing stone of what would have been the tallest trilithon in the inner horseshoe, with an intact trilithon beyond it.

Trilithon from the inner horseshoe, some intact sarsens from the outer circle, and a couple of intact bluestones.

I'm standing in the center, looking northeast towards the sunset. 

The openings in the trilithons that make up the inner horseshoe are quite narrow; they're much wider in the outer sarsen circle.

Looking south, with Bluestones from the inner circle, a trilithon from the Horseshoe, and a sarsen stone from the outer circle.

This stone is very special! See the line of carved graffiti, which probably dates from sometime in the 1600s? Below that are carvings of daggers that date from probably 1750-1500 BCE. There are just a very few examples of original carvings here, and it's theorized that these are meant to be viewed with similar carvings on a sarsen to its north to point towards the southern major moonrise. 

This was formerly one of the uprights of the tallest trilithon in the horseshoe, but it's fallen towards the center and broken into two pieces. It's been extensively graffitied with carvings over the centuries, and it's heavily damaged by tourists who've hammered pieces off of it.

The lintel of the trilithon that Matt is looking at actually fell in 1797, and lay on the ground until its restoration in 1958.

Southeast trilithon, with a seated Julie for scale!

These uprights are really cool, because you can see that the Neolithic people carved the uprights and lintels with mortise and tenon joints. There's even a lintel with mortises carved on both sides, presumably because they messed up the spacing on one side, so they just flipped it over and tried again on the other side!

This is the tallest standing stone at Stonehenge, at 22'7" to the top of the tenon. It would have paired with the stone next to it, now fallen, to make the tallest trilithon at the center of the horseshoe.

The sun is beginning to set behind the northwesternmost remaining part of the sarsen outer circle! The lintel and one of the uprights fell in 1900, and the lintel broke in half. It was repaired and restored in the 1950s. 

Selfie with a southeast Sarsen!

Tallest standing stone, with teenager for scale.

The sun beginning to set behind the western stones was my favorite part of our time inside Stonehenge. You see how many photos I have just of the stones, right? Now imagine about ten times that many family photos, with my patient family staged in various poses and groupings, framed interestingly silhouetted by the sunset and the stones, every time I could catch them. Send thoughts and prayers to the teenager, especially, who was required to utilize the several thousand dollars I've spent on her ballet training to leap and do other pretty dancer things while I photographed her. She can count herself lucky that our luggage constraints meant I couldn't require her to bring a pair of old pointe shoes for additional poses!

Looking northeast at the shadow of the Sarsen Circle.

The northeast section contains the longest remaining intact portion of the Sarsen Circle.

Looking east towards the two intact trilithons on the south side of the horseshoe, with the shadow of the one other intact trilithon and the tallest standing stone. Delighted Julie posed for scale!

Looking southeast towards the A303. I love this photo of Matt in the shadow of the Sarsen Circle!

We wandered the inner circle for about an hour, then finally our Day of Giant Rocks was over. Fortunately, our inn was just a few minutes away, and dinnertime was just a few minutes after that!

Here is a glass of water that is noticeable because of the American-sized portion of ICE!!! The American obsession with ice is because we've always had access to so much of it, what with our Great Lakes to the north that supported an industry of harvesting ice, packing it in sawdust, and sending it south. Countries that didn't have this kind of access never got accustomed to icy beverages, and now they think we're weird.

Actually, it was a running joke during our entire trip that England apparently places little value on hydration in general. The one time that Matt asked for a refill of his Coke in a restaurant the waiter looked so visibly disturbed that as soon as he left the rest of us were all, "OMG that was so embarrassing you can never do that again!" It turned out that the secret was just to order a hard cider instead of a soft drink. Refills of cider are socially approved!

We also had a little lesson in British food that we honestly probably should have already known. Some of us ordered pizza, and it came out looking like this and tasted absolutely delicious.

I demolished this pizza. It was so good! The little container of ranch was another funny American touch. They really wanted me to feel at home!

This, however, is my poor teenager's order of "nachos."

She has tortilla chips, a little bit of queso, a sweet(!) meat sauce, then little containers of sour cream, a kind of guacamole, and a tomato sauce that a nod to salsa. And five peppers sans heat. Her dismay was probably very similar to what European tourists to America feel when they eat at, say, an Olive Garden. 

The serving board was beautiful, though!

• Day 1: We made it to England!
• Day 2: Westminster Abbey, National Gallery, Trafalgar Square, and Six
• Day 3: British Museum and Buckingham Palace
• Day 4: Mudlarks and Southwark
• Day 5: Natural History Museum and Victoria and Albert Museum
• Day 6: Pax Lodge, the Tower of London, and Afternoon Tea
• Day 7: Back and Forth by Boat to Greenwich
• Day 8: We Careen Our Way to Canterbury Cathedral and Dover Beach
• Day 9: Dover, Hastings, and a Holloway
• Day 10, Part 1: All the Giant Rocks
• Day 10, Part 2: Stonehenge, At Last!
• Day 11: To Avalon with King Arthur
• Day 12: Tintagel
• Day 13: In the Footsteps of Mary Anning
• Day 14: Homewards!