And you thought living in Lawrence had taught you all there was to know about the Baker Wetlands.

Now there’s a a new source of information on the environmentally sensitive area that has been at the heart of debate about the South Lawrence Trafficway, and it goes beyond the everyday newspaper articles and press releases.

Last spring, a class of Kansas University undergraduate students spent a semester researching two square miles of the wetlands. In the past several weeks, their instructor, Robb Campbell, has posted the resulting bibliography on his Web site.

The site, robertwellmancamp-bell.com, includes more than 250 entries for such sources as city development plans from the 1940s and an 1856 map of Lawrence.

One student traveled to Leavenworth to dig up documents on how the United States dealt with native people in the area, and another spent hours at Haskell Indian Nations University.

“It’s a bibliography,” said Campbell, a Ph.D. candidate and assistant instructor. “It’s not like it makes for juicy reading.”

Kansas University history students including Tyler Lindquist, left, and Celeste Fish recently completed an online bibliography detailing the history of the Baker Wetlands. The bibliography includes Haskell and city documents, newspaper articles and maps. On Friday, Lindquist and Fish visited the wetlands, where they inspected cattails and native grasses.

But it does provide direction for those who want in-depth information about an area that has led to culture clash both between races and ideologies.

“I think a bibliography is a really useful thing to put on the Internet,” Campbell said, adding that it moves beyond opinion to something more academic. “It seems relevant. It seems credible.”

The Haskell-Baker Bibliography was created by students in History 562, History of the 20th-Century U.S., after they took a field trip to the wetlands and were assigned term papers worth one-third of their final grade.

“I wanted to make this history class not a lot of abstractions,” Campbell said. “And the only way to do that was to do it locally.”

Haskell institute students hoe on the school farm in this photo from the early 1900s. Photos like this one from the Haskell archives were among the artifacts Kansas University students studied to compile the online bibliography.

Despite the amount of work required by the assignment, class members said they enjoyed the work, and that the larger community could learn from the results.

“It’s just really interesting how many different things can affect one piece of land,” said Tyler Lindquist, a Windom native who took the class and is now earning a master’s degree in urban planning. “There’s a number of different issues that people could be interested in.”

Readers can use the sources outlined in the bibliography to get a real grasp of the history behind the wetlands and to learn about Lawrence’s development strategies over the years, said Celeste Fish, a civil engineering major from Pittsburg.

And the bottom line, Campbell said, is that people have studied this area over and over again, so it makes sense to use the information available and not “reinvent the wheel.”

See other stories about the Wetlands and the South Lawrence Trafficwayrobertwellmancampbell.com