HIST 100: Engineering The Past

Kayla Pollard

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Hi I’m Kayla Pollard! I’m originally from Boise and I am a sophomore this year.  I’m majoring in marketing and minoring in psychology.

Growing up as an only child really shaped how I see the world.  Because I would have been at home bored a lot, my parents encouraged me to spend time with friends.  I experienced a lot of different family dynamics and opinions on topics.  When interacting with each other my family tends to be very reserved, and many of the families I’ve spent time with were very open and outgoing with each other.  One of the biggest things that shaped the way I see things is that my family is very democratic and a lot of my friends’ families had republican view points.  Being around two opposites so often taught me that there are always two sides to a story, and to see both sides before forming my own opinion on subjects.

To continue with seeing different ways of things I have grown up in a biracial family.  My mother is African American and my father is Caucasian.  Even though my mom grew up in Boise her mother made sure to keep the traditions their family had when living in the South alive.  Holidays were always divided into the mornings being my mother’s family traditions and the evenings being for father’s.  I feel like this has always made me very open to seeing different cultures and excited to learn about cultures that are not my own.

I haven’t traveled to any foreign countries, but when travelling in the United States I have seen the different types of lifestyles people can have.  Living in Boise my entire life it has always been a relatively safe place.  When visiting bigger cities, I have seen lower income areas and how that changes the mindset of the people there.  People tend to be more on guard about their surroundings and not as openly friendly to strangers.  Not to say people in bigger cities aren’t friendly as a whole, they just don’t express it as much as people in Boise do.

I normally hear about current events through social media or on the news.  After hearing about a topic that interests me I tend to search out multiple articles about it.  Once I get an understanding of what is happening I have found that I really enjoy seeing what other people have to say about the topic by looking at what people are posting on Twitter or Facebook.

Seeing as I that I experience so many opposites in my everyday life I am always interested in why people think the way they do, and how it shapes what they do.  Instead of just accepting that it was done, I always like to reflect and think about the meaning behind people’s actions and decisions were.

I’m so excited to be in a group with you guys this semester! Hope we have a good time!

Nick Mooney lens

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Hi my name is Nick and this is my second year of college. I am currently pursuing a Electrical Engineering degree. I was born in California, moved to Boise when i was 7. Growing up in Idaho was not to bad, i did lots of snowboarding as a young teenager, also did lots of camping trips with my family. I spent most summers road tripping to some place with the family. Having done lots of outdoors activities and going to new places on road trips has really taught me to appreciate life and time with the family. After high school i got onto a very destructive path. At the age of 19 i joined the military, having since joined it really taught me that there are bigger things out there to worry about and deal with then just myself.  I have always been an avid reader, it really started when i was in Jr High school. I will read anywhere from 2 to 6 books a year. I read science fiction mostly but will also pick up history and autobiography’s. I don’t really read the news to much, i get upset from the amount of violence in the world and also the level of stupidity of some people(common sense is not so common). So i spend my free time with my wife and kids, as much as i can because i leave the states a lot. When i get a chance i also do woodworking, little things mostly, but I did finish making my kids beds before Christmas.

Being in the military is the biggest lens I view the world and other people threw. I feel that it has made me specifically a better person. I am hoping to learn different ways to view the world, in the chance that it can make me a better person and leader.

My lens: A bleeding-heart California liberal who came to Idaho to destroy your way of life

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(Note: This is a long post for this assignment, but I think it’s important for you to know whence your professor speaks and acts.)

That post title is in jest, of course. Well, mostly.

But I get ahead of myself. . .

When I was a child, four generations of my family lived on the same residential block in Long Beach, California. My grandfather was a retired lifeguard and police officer who in his retirement made some extra money by refinishing the woodwork on the yachts floating on the canals and marinas of an adjacent neighborhood. My grandmother took care of grandkids and cats. My parents were both high school teachers and most of my aunts and uncles worked in public education as well.

If you grew up in a city or town, maybe this, minus the yachts, sounds a bit like your own upbringing—two working parents, lots of family nearby.

If you grew up in Idaho, however, chances are that’s where the similarity ends.

As educators, my parents, aunts, and uncles were all union members. And we lived in what was increasingly acknowledged to be a gay neighborhood, with many gay couples and families on our block and the next.

My schools were diverse. Among them, kids at my high school spoke 50 languages, and in the district they spoke 150. Twenty percent of the kids at my high school were white; the remainder was evenly divided among Asian Americans, African Americans, Pacific Islanders, and Latina/os. It was Snoop Dogg’s high school, and I wrote the obituary page in the yearbook.

When I started college, I thought I wanted to study 18th- and 19th-century U.S. history, and I wanted to attend a college smaller than my high school (which had 4,000 students). What better place to be, 18-year-old me thought, than a small public college in Fredericksburg, Virginia?

Ends up I wasn’t prepared for that kind of culture shock; I wasn’t ready to be in a place where there people still flew Confederate flags and where the college was 95 percent white. I left that college after only a semester and went to community college back home in Long Beach before transferring to a small liberal arts college in Grinnell, Iowa, a town whose population was at that time 8,000. Surprisingly, despite the differences between Southern California and central Iowa, I felt very much at home.

That’s where my education really took off and the shape of my lens began to change. At Grinnell College, we didn’t have any general education requirements. We had small classes, and the college offered us all kinds of resources. The vast majority of students lived on campus, forming a strong and vibrant community. We were encouraged to prepare ourselves not for a vocation, but rather for a life of service and civic engagement. Many of my fellow alumni work in the public sector, and they take pride in their work for government and in nonprofits.

I went to grad school at UC Davis, earning three degrees—two Master’s degrees (in creative writing and cultural studies) and a Ph.D. (cultural studies). All through grad school, I taught undergraduates. Upon graduation, I worked at the university in academic technology and in the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning, where I helped faculty be more thoughtful about teaching undergraduates. I also taught graduate courses.

All this time, I read widely and deeply. Books, articles, blogs—whatever I could lay my eyes in my spare time.

Taken collectively, these experiences made me value diversity—and not just in a knee-jerk way that applauds multiculturalism. Rather, I like to hear and engage with all kinds of voices. My experiences as a woman who had met countless other women, as well as LGBT people, who were struggling to make their way in the world made me a feminist. (For me, being a feminist means acknowledging the humanity of all people, regardless of gender, sex, or sexuality and speaking up when I see bias, harassment, or unfairness related to gender and sex—especially if it’s a pattern.) Furthermore, the kinds of violence I saw, heard, and read about made me deeply pacifist; while I do not consider myself a religious person, these days my philosophical outlook leans Quakerly.

 

I share all of this as a way of saying that in this class some of you are going to feel as if we’re talking across a huge cultural and political—and perhaps sometimes even a factual—gap. Learning to talk across that gap, learning to talk with and listen to people with very different perspectives and experiences, is, I have discovered, a skill that can enrich one’s life immeasurably.

Since coming to Idaho in 2010, I have enjoyed immensely the conversations I’ve had with students from all over the West and from across the political spectrum. I don’t need to agree with someone to respect and like that person. And I’m certainly not here to indoctrinate anyone, though I know I have changed a few minds. . .and I’ve had my own mind changed.

At the same time, occasionally my beliefs and I have been caricatured by students and others. (Hence the post title.) In one case late last summer, someone I had never met or even heard of found one quote by me in a months-old press release by an organization with which I sometimes volunteer, extrapolated wildly from that quote about my beliefs, and posted about me in a far-right Facebook group; he even included a photo of me to make me easier to identify.

Death threats and threats of sexual assault followed, and that post was shared more than 120 times, amplifying its hatred. I had to get campus security and city police involved to protect me and my family. The police encouraged me to get the FBI and a counterterrorism task force involved. I didn’t want to escalate the situation, so I let it drop and eventually the haters grew quiet, though I am anxious about another flare-up during the legislative session. I wish the person who made the initial post on Facebook had simply reached out to me rather than committing libel, attacking me, and inciting others to violence.

 

All of these experiences and others have increased my interest in empathy. Why do some people have so much of it? How can I develop empathy for people who attack me or my beliefs? What am I not hearing? What am I not seeing? How did these people come to have such different habits, beliefs, and values than I do? And at what moments is it appropriate for me to engage with them respectfully around these beliefs and values, and at what points should I push them to consider new perspectives and change their habits?

That’s the lens through which I view the world: that of an intellectually curious progressive who genuinely likes all kinds of people and tries to be optimistic about the present and the future, even when it’s hard.