As the event approaches...

I feel a bit more confident about the event. I am excited that we are getting the home-cooked food added to the menu because I am also an advocate for its ability to bring people together. When we think about cookouts, they are usually hosted in backyards or other family based events so I feel as though we will attach that attitude to our event.

Our demographic work is still a work in progress so we will have more to report on that in a few days.

In terms of getting the word out, I have posted a few flyers in the American Studies hallway and talked about it in a few AMST classes but plan on tackling them all as the event approaches..as in next week or the week after. I just want to compile a list of what I will say as well as the benefits to attending our event to generate a buzz, sell t-shirts and tickets. I am excited all in all!

Demographics

I finally feel useful! The demographics portion of our experience seems to be tedious but very interesting to say the least. When visiting the basement of the library, I came across so many different categorizations of race and ethnicity adopted by our country for classification issues that I had previously known of, but just felt differently seeing it in front of me for the first time. I knew that actually interacting with these documents for the purpose of this class would be just as interesting; I may even get a bit aggravated.

The trends that we have noticed thus far were expected. The categorizations of what constituted minority groups shifted over time but nonetheless, kept Caucasians in larger numbers. We are still working on documenting information from each decade starting with 1940 so I believe that I will have more to say on the matter and our findings come the end of the week.