Ten Days A Madwoman Essay

On the first day of class, our teacher had a ton of books with different possible topics, and at first we really just couldn’t find anything that interested all of us. It was difficult to agree on anything completely, considering there were four of us, and then our teacher brought over a book called “Ten Days a Madwoman” about Nellie Bly, and we immediately were interested and agreed.
We started off our research with just books and websites in order to get to background knowledge on our topic, and once we knew more, we knew the kind of research we needed to find. We visited a museum exhibit all about a asylum that was in our area about the same time the Blackwell asylum was. We visited the archives at UW Green Bay for a day, where we found many books and online resources. We also conducted three interviews, one with Gabriel Loiacono, a professor at UW Oshkosh who is very informed of early asylums, one with Susan Rensing, a professor of women's & gender studies and history who knows a lot about Nellie Bly and her impact, and one with Meg Jones, a female investigative reporter. Another thing we did was look in the national newspaper archives and looked through at least a hundred newspaper publications from the paper Nellie Bly published in. And of course, we read the book that Nellie Bly wrote

We didn’t do the tri-fold presentation because the word limit is so small, and we just had way too much to say. We didn’t chose the play because we didn’t think that acting this out could really show the intensity of her situation like our words might be able to. And lastly, we didn’t do a documentary, because even though we may be able to tell the story by speaking it, there isn’t that much to view about her, and we wouldn’t want to bore the judges. So that left website, which we found would be the perfect way to organize all of our thoughts and her entire story, which being able to keep it