Program for the Dick Dowling Monument Rededication, Houston Public Library (HMRC SC1268-01-01)
In your second blog posts, you closely examined the Dick Dowling statue in Hermann Park and came up with some excellent research questions about the statue itself and the memory of the Battle of Sabine Pass. In this blog post, you’ll have the opportunity to do research with primary source documents to answer some of those questions and to generate more.
STEP 1: Read and Research. Before writing your post, go back and look at some of the questions that you and your classmates wanted answered about the Dowling statue. Then, spend at least an hour or two browsing through the Houston Public Library Digital Archives related to Dowling and the Statue. (The image in this post is an example of the kind of thing you’ll find in the archive: an invitation to the dedication ceremony held at the statue in 1997.) See if you can find anything that you think helps answer a question you or another student has about the statue. As explained in class on Tuesday, make note of the specific call number (usually something SC-1268-01-01) for any item of interest to you; the call numbers are listed in the navigation pane on the left. Note that to navigate the archive you should use a web browser that can easily load PDF files within the browser itself, like Safari or Explorer. Optional: As you try to answer your questions, you may also wish to consult the article “Dick Dowling and the Battle of Sabine Pass” by Andrew Forest Muir, a former professor here at Rice (available here as a PDF), or the book Sabine Pass, by Edward Cotham, which is available on desk reserve at Fondren.
STEP 2: Report. As you write your post, begin by reporting on what you found in the archive. What questions about Dowling can the item(s) help answer? In your report, you may cite the Muir article and/or the Cotham book if you would like, but be sure to include at least some citation to the items in the archive itself, using the call numbers you recorded while browsing.
STEP 3: Raise New Questions. Conclude your post by generating some new question(s) about the statue or about the memory of Dowling that was prompted by your browsing through the archive.
This post will be due by 9 a.m. on Thursday, February 10. You may also notice comments on your posts being left by some Rice students whose names you won’t recognize. This semester, four students are enrolled in an independent study course (HIST 300) that is focused on public history and Civil War Memory. They will be working intensively on the Omeka archive that we will also be working in our class, and they have already read and discussed Cotham’s book on Sabine Pass. Two of these HIST 300 students, Kat and Jocelyn, are in our class; two of them, Ryan and Jaclyn, are not. I’ve encouraged all four of them to chime in on your posts when and where they can shed light from their deeper study of the battle and of Civil War memory.