The big picture: UAA's Archives and Special Collections provides a broader view of Alaska's history

Jennifer Stone, associate professor in UAA's Department of English, looks to the UAA/APU Consortium Library's Archives and Special Collections as a resource for her History of the English Language class. She asks her students to find a document - a letter, recipe or literary text - that they could research the historical context of why it existed and also examine the language people were using in the text.

Stone sees it as an opportunity for her students to get out of the classroom and connect with the people who helped shape our state's past.

For Ian Hartman, associate professor in UAA's Department of History and Alaska Historical Society board member, Stone's classroom assignment yielded an opportunity for both his history students and AHS. The collaborative effort between Hartman's history students and AHS resulted in his students producing a video of current archive users benefiting from the wealth of historical information within UAA's Archives and Special Collections. 

English and German major Rose Kruger dug into her family's history, finding documents from the early 1900s, to learn more about her grandfather's experience as an Alaska Native at one of the missionary boarding schools in Anvik. English major Hollis Reddington was intrigued by his professor's assignment and found photos dating back to World War II from the Battle of Attu and learned about different perspectives of the war from the photo's captions.

Stone said she hopes her students gain a better and broader understanding of the local people and places that have shaped Alaska into the modern state that it is today.