Your help, please.

Ok, so I want to apply for Directed Studies. (See Oh, Eli). And to do that, I have to write two essays. I wrote this draft for the first one today, and I would like your help. Please read it, add what comments you will. No need to be nice, but constructive things are always better than not.
An essay of approximately 750 words that discusses an influential course you have taken. Your focus should be on the course itself, not the teacher, and it may be a course whose significance was not necessarily positive.

Last summer, I took an archaeological field school through DePaul University. Our site had been the famous Pullman Palace Car factory, but any glamour the buildings once had was lost in a devastating fire about ten years ago. The remaining buildings were old, built by George Pullman in the late nineteenth century to house his offices and assembly plants. Behind them, a large empty space stretched back to more modern factories and warehouses. This overgrown urban jungle concealed bare foundations and industrial treasures, and a history forgotten even by historians.
Pullman is still known today, though not as much for Mr. George Pullman, his elaborate rail cars, or his innovative factory operations. Rather, Pullman is associated with a brutal era of labor conflicts and owner retaliation, especially the strike that bears the same name or the Pullman porters. And today, the small Southside community is still struggling to overcome the economic troubles that began when the factory finally closed in the 1970s. The neighborhood has its treasures, like any other: the row houses built for foremen, the beautiful Victorian hotel that echoes the grandeur of a bygone age, and the McDonald’s decorated with Pullman memorabilia.
The factory itself is mostly gone now, a burnt-out hulking structure of Lake Calumet brick. Even the clock tower, once the symbol of an entire industry, stands scorched and empty, surrounded by weeds and the bitter dust of progress.
It was into this landscape that my field school entered, trowels and brooms at the ready. Industrial archeology is not a glamorous field. There are no ancient treasures or golden masks to be unearthed. It is not the stuff of legends. But the class was not about glamour or legends. Rather, the finds revealed a more intimate knowledge of people’s lives. We mistakenly believe that we know everything about the people who lived in the newly industrialized world. After all, they lived where we lived, spoke the language we still speak, did jobs that are still familiar to us. But we do not see what we have lost in the intervening years.
The process at the Pullman Car Works that summer was an amazing means of rediscovering what society had lost to time and “progress”. I found inspiration in the simple things we found, like bottle caps, chicken bones, and teacup handles. These things were a part of the place, literally within the soil, and they gave me a connection to the people who worked there every day as I did, generations ago. The littlest things have been lost to the broad strokes of the historical record. Only the most important people, the most pivotal events are captured in our notion of the past. But in this class, the events found in my history books could not capture the pervasive sense of life and work that the most common objects of yesteryear exuded.
For my final paper, I contacted a gentleman who worked at the Pullman site in the years immediately following World War II. We had several long conversations, and he shared his whole life history with me, from his experience as a soldier in Europe, his work at Pullman, and his job as a Chicago streetcar driver. The little relics we found were the things that he and his peers left behind on their journey to the present. This fine man, who was kind enough to help me write my paper, is representative of the community I found stretching backward into the past, starting with my own experience there and arcing back to the original surveyors of the site for George Pullman himself. Their work was the industrial foundation that modern-day America rests on, and I was able to dig through the physical remnants of that foundation.
Pullman has left a yearning for a connection with the peoples of the past with me. The class emphasized the idea that history is not a dry collection of names, dates and events. Instead, it is the life of a community and the lives of individuals who leave their traces both in the chronicles of a society and in the dirt beneath their feet. The place I worked may not be more than an arson scene, an abandoned lot, or a dangerous eyesore to some, but to have been there and pulled pieces of people’s lives from underground, I understand it to be a relic from the past. We can ignore it, choosing the glamour of the well-known history, or we can reach out for what is left under the glimmering surface. We can find the deeper, spiritual connection to the past through people and the things they have left us if only we look.