Through researching and writing this thesis, I was able to continue developing skills that I will need in graduate school and eventually a career in a history-related field. These skills include research, writing, and familiarizing myself with archives and the different sources they contain. It also deepened my relationships with faculty and other students within the History Department, which was important both for improving my work on this project and for advancing towards future goals like getting accepted into a graduate program.
One of the main challenges of writing about history is communicating clearly about a topic that many people reading will not have much prior knowledge of. I chose to write my thesis for a general audience. This means describing complex concepts like 19th-century religious movements, communalism, different modes of transportation and almost a century of history clearly in only about two chapters. This involved careful word choice, revisions and the help of others such as my advisor or my classmates. Most importantly, it required enough research that I felt comfortable explaining these topics in-depth.
Researching this project involved consulting a wide variety of sources and reading them critically. I had to make connections between sources that were not always obvious at first. For example, inferring that the number and diversity of guests in the Zoar Hotel guestbook suggested the popularity of Zoar as a stop on the canal. Another example was connecting the increase in tourism to Zoar with accounts of increasing outside influence in Zoar, which led some younger members to leave the town in search of new opportunities.