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Jesse Cucksee
always knew he’d go to college, but he didn’t always think he’d
end up pursuing a history degree.
“For a long time, I thought I’d be an engineer,” says Cucksee, a
Mohawk Industries employee who works 30 – 40 hours per week in
Product Development. “I even considered being a chef because I
love to cook.”
The Varnell native earned a dual-seal high school diploma in
2006, which includes both a college prep seal from Northwest
High and a tech prep seal from the Whitfield County Career
Academy, so he was equally poised to pursue careers in either
the liberal arts or in technology.
But his lifelong interest in history was ignited when he
enrolled in Dr. Michael Morris’s U. S. History until 1877 class
in the fall of 2006.
“The way Dr. Morris teaches history is as if he’s telling a
story,” Cucksee recalls. “Everyone in the class was mesmerized.
We would all get so caught up in his lecture that we couldn’t
take down all of our notes before it was time to go to our next
class.”
As Advisor to the History Club, Dr. Morris made history come
alive, Cucksee says, when he took club members to a Native
American historical site, where they were able to get “hands-on”
experience with Native American weapons and tools. |
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“I think that fueled my
interest in United States Native American history, but I’m also
very interested in relations between Ancient China, Mongolia,
and Japan,” he says.
His interest in Asian History led him to enroll in the Summer
Study in China program this year.
“Learning about history from a textbook is interesting, but to
be able to go and experience firsthand all of the sites you’re
learning about, that just puts you onto a whole different
playing field,” says Cucksee, who expects to graduate in May
with Associate of Arts degrees in both History and Economics.
“Actually being there gives you a much different perspective
than you had before.”
An example of that change in perspective for him, he says, when
he became aware of the human rights activists who were
protesting the Olympics because of concerns over what they
considered to be unfair labor issues.
“China is so overpopulated, and there are so many people who
need jobs. Some of the people sweeping the streets were using
archaic tools, like big tree limbs with leaves on them used to
sweep the roads. The government could buy extra equipment to
sweep the streets more efficiently. But the fact that they’re
paying those people to do those jobs is actually keeping them
fed. It’s the only way some of them provide food on the table
each day.”
Providing food for one’s family, discovered Cucksee, is not
nearly as easy a task as it is in the United States. “With such
a large population, food was always scarce, so the Chinese
peasantry wasn’t picky about what they ate. They would look
everywhere for things that were edible. Anything from cooked
roots and leaves to congealed pig’s blood pudding were placed
upon our tables on many separate occasions.”
One of his biggest insights on the trip was that “we, as
Americans, don’t really need all the luxuries we think we have
to have to be happy.”
Field trips to sites he’d long dreamed of seeing, such as the
Museum of Qin Terra Cotta Warriors and Horses, Tiananmen Square,
and the Great Wall of China, were memorable, he says. But a trip
to the Yuntai Mountains, with its crystal blue water, mountain
ranges, and huge rock formations, was his favorite “sight,” and
“puts the Grand Canyon to shame, really.”
But the trip was not all fun and games. For the two classes in
Chinese History that Cucksee took, two papers per day, averaging
five pages apiece, were required during the Zhengzhou portion of
the trip, where the academic courses were offered.
“It was a lot of work, but it was definitely worth it.”
When Cucksee earns his two associate degrees, he plans to finish
his bachelor’s in history, and then pursue a master’s and a
Ph.D. in that field.
“I’d love to come back to Dalton State and teach history one
day.”
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