Community History: Dramatizing a Story Old Tempe

Introduction

Communities have a history. Things happened in the past that helped to make a community the way it is now. It is fun to see how life has changed over time.

A mercantile store in early Tempe. Tempe Historical Museum

A grocery store in Tempe today. Photo by Jim Wright

We are going to look at Tempe, Arizona, 135 years ago when the community was just beginning. Then we will write plays about life back then.

Doing your own thing

Perhaps you’d like to research your community rather than study Tempe. Check out Researching the Past for ideas about what to do.

Then we hope you’ll rejoin us to create and then videotape dramas about communities from the past.

Finding out about Tempe, Arizona, 100 years ago

We will use the four big ideas of Social Studies to find out about the history of Tempe:

• geography, the landforms, bodies of water, natural resources and the climate
• culture, how the people lived, what they believed
• economy, the work they did, the businesses they had, and how they spent their money
• geography, the leaders they had and the things to make life easier, like bridges

You will need to research what it was like to live in Tempe a hundred years ago so you can write and videotape your play. You will get your information in two ways:

1. by reading the story of Tempe 130 years ago.
2. by carefully examining a photo taken in Old Tempe to see clues about how life was different then.

Reading a photograph

Historians, people who write the stories about the past, use artifacts to help them understand what happened. An artifact is something that was used in the past. Photos are one kind of artifact that can help tell about the lives of people. Photographs can show the geography, the landforms and climate. They can show houses and other buildings. They can show what people put in those buildings and what they wore. Photos can let us see the people who were there. Pictures of famous and less famous people give us hints about who they were and what their lives were like. We can see them at work and at play. We can see them at home and out shopping.

You’re going to be a historian and study a photograph to find out about the past. Let’s sharpen our researcher’s eye. See what you can learn from this photo.

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