By Catherine Mclaughlin
THE LACONIA DAILY SUN
LACONIA — This spring, Laconia High School U.S. history students will use learning to forge new bonds — with their community, with their sense of place and with the work of real-world historians.
Beginning in March and culminating with a presentation in May, students in Taylor Osborne’s U.S. history class will examine and record Laconia’s experience of the Vietnam War. They will interview veterans and their families, read journals and local news stories, analyze and place photographs and organize their findings into a website. The Laconia Historical and Museum Society will collaborate with students on the project.
Osborne, in his second year as LHS faculty, got the idea for a project-based unit immersing students in local history from Lisa Hinds, the current academic coordinator who was recently hired as the next LHS principal. He decided to train the project’s focus on the Vietnam War era out of both personal interest and curricular value.
U.S. history courses, Osborne explained, often don’t get the chance to delve deeply into the latter half of the 20th century.
“You never get to teach the Vietnam War in U.S. history, because you always run out of time somewhere in the awkward stage between World War I and World War II,” Osborne said. “So this was my chance to focus a lot on the Cold War and the Vietnam War and to really go in deep with kids.”
He also personally is fascinated with the period: Osborne’s father, born in the early 1950s, regaled him as a child with stories about what it was like to grow up in the turbulent times of the ’60s and ’70s.
Because of both his own, the community’s and his students’ familial ties to the conflict, he believes the project will bring a vibrancy and a realness to history for his pupils.
“This project is focusing on a generation that is not very far from us at all — this is a living, breathing topic that we’re looking at, and this is connecting kids with their community,” he said.
In both its process and its contents, Osborne continued, the project offers students critical lessons at an opportune time.
The project will remove textbooks as the primary access to history, showing students how real historians research and learn, Osborne said. That was how he first became hooked on history, and he hopes his students have a similar experience.
“Not many high school students get an opportunity to actually be a historian,” Osborne said. “My hope academically is that this can be something that engages some kids in history, maybe for the first time in their life.”
The skills involved in this project — learning how to read and handle primary sources, perform longer-term research, conduct interviews and organize their discoveries into a group product — are not only great preparation for higher learning but for life, Osborne explained.
The project may also help students feel rooted in their home city and its history after years of disruption and disconnect.
The Vietnam War era saw a real social grappling with unfolding history, by both soldiers and people on the home front, explained Tara Shore, president of the Laconia Historical and Museum Society. “Our students can really connect with that,” she said.
Studying the local experience of a major historical period, Shore said, immerses students more deeply in two directions. Being able to see history through a local lens brings them closer to the history itself and to their city and their neighbors.
The project will also benefit the broader community, in addition to what it offers students.
“What these students will do is gather and compile a lot of the city’s Vietnam history in one place. We don’t really have that right now,” Shore said, adding that it is also the first collaboration of its kind between the historical society and LHS. “It will be an important addition to the city’s history” that future students and other citizens will be able to access and add to going forward.
Veterans and local historians Warren Huse and Ray Peavey Jr. will collaborate closely with Osborne and his students.
“It’s been 50 years since Vietnam, and 50 years since the last time we had a draft,” Huse said. “This is a period of time in our history — especially since they are 17- and 18-year-olds — that they need to know something about.” Huse added that he’s especially keen for students to learn about the Battery C unit, a group Laconia sent to the front lines.
Osborne and his students are looking for help, calling for any pieces of history Laconians have at home from the period or connected to it — photos, news clippings, letters, journals, objects. Osborne noted that he is experienced in the safe handling of primary source documents and artifacts and any shared pieces will be returned to their original owners.
Anyone who could contribute or has questions can reach Osborne at [email protected].
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