work. Together, we discovered common ground in the history we were making. The past became a terrain of exchanges across racial, class, and generational lines.When Mosaic premiered the play 2001 Hastings Street to sell-out crowds at Detroit's Music Hall in May 2001, it was more than a good evening's entertainment. The audience "talked back" all through the performance-murmuring assent, remembering and reliving long-forgotten moments across the aisles and in the lobby, and in their applause affirming these young actors as the carriers of their memories and the heirs of their experience. For performers and audience alike, this history, enacted and public, helped to validate the present and to evoke a future. It served a public good. No classroom performance, however eloquent or compelling, could have taught undergraduate students of history so well this deeper lesson about why we study and teach history. 6In the past three decades, as college pedagogy has come to emphasize the benefits of cooperative classroom environments and experiential learning and as more historians study their subject from the bottom up, focusing their research on traditionally ignored or disempowered groups, history teaching has increasingly moved away from the top-down lecture format toward new methods of presenting history. The benefits of new methodologies are widely recognized. Cooperative classrooms and experiential learning enable students to engage more fully with historical materials, to enjoy multiple perspectives on historical evidence, and, it is hoped, to gain a better understanding of the past and the process of writing history. In contrast, a parallel innovation in college teaching-community-based research, or service learning-has few advocates in the field of history. Service or community-based learning engages students in meeting local needs in order to link the classroom and the community and thereby to create more civic-minded individuals and a more engaged academic scholarship.
In order to facilitate commercial transactions and economic investment after the American Revolution, many inhabitants of northern Virginia became convinced that the region needed financial institutions. Indeed, most politically active residents of the region—at least after the 1790s—saw banks as crucial agents of economic development. Thus, the philosophy of “agrarian republicans” such as Thomas Jefferson and John Taylor of Carolina—who saw banks as monopolistic and anti-republican institutions—had limited appeal in the region. Moreover, the banks of northern Virginia were not controlled by planters who sought capital to finance the purchase of slaves and land. Instead, banks supported a wide range of economic endeavors—agriculture, industry, internal improvement projects, and commercial activities. The broadening access to bank capital in northern Virginia reveals that in the South—as in the northern states—there was a “democratization” of banking in the years after Revolution.
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