A great semester! New approaches prove successful.

As the semester winds down and I am grading the finals, it has been exceptionally rewarding to see how much improvement my students made this go-around in my 101 course.  Teaching roughly 7000 years of history is no joke!  For a community college’s introduction to history course, I try to emphasize a general knowledge of the eras that produced the modern western civilization we live in today and the skills of the historian.

It had been immediately evident in the finals I have graded so far that the improvement in working the historian’s craft was considerable–not only in reading and rating the reliability of primary sources, but also in constructing a logical argument for one’s interpretation of the sources.  Reading and writing skills have improved as they have learned how to approach the material.

This semester I worked towards this goal in a couple of new ways:

• The midterm was broken into three parts and the first two of these parts were collaborative–and the grades were curved.  The midterm asked them to replicate as much of the reading and writing skills as we had covered in class up to that point while also testing their knowledge of the readings and eras up to that point.  (The greater emphasis on analysis followed their own collective attempts at first on the midterm.)
• I provided extra credit assignments (two) that specifically emphasized these skills after the midterm–groups that struggled the most on the midterm could thus practice the skills further in the following weeks and earn extra credit for the additional practice.
• I modeled, with the class’s help, the prioritization of reliable sources when conflicting accounts exist and constructing a basic outline for a history paper.  (Extra credit assignments built directly on these in-class/homework exercises.)

These activities seemed to really help students grow in their understanding of the material.  One could tank on the midterm, but still work towards a successful grade in the class if one was willing to put the work into the class and the projects with the extra credit options.  It was important for me to give students the opportunity to collaboratively see how far they had come on their own and take some risks, but I did not want to punish them if they hadn’t come as far by week six as I hoped they would by finals week.  (I should point out that our institution has a really early midterm.)

The major drawback was that some students were too greatly discouraged and did not see how they could climb out of the hole–none of these ever approached me about their grades or situation before quitting, though.  Students who flat out failed the midterm recovered to earn grades in the 80-90% range.  So, it was definitely possible to make the turn around–most of these did come and speak to me or e-mail me about their grades.  I did not give anyone a free pass–each student earned their grades–though, I was far more lenient in grading the finals where grammar and syntax was concerned.  (This was, in part, because of the high number of ESL students in my evening course who do not have easy access to tutoring resources on campus; and, in part, it was due to the fact that I am not handing back the finals for students to see their mistakes.  Besides, at this point I was far more concerned with their historical understanding and was gratified to observe considerable improvement in organizing their essays and in writing even if they still have work to do in that area.)

Students who were sharper on the first day of class further honed their skills and understood far more about the historical process.  Students who were green gained new understanding and experiences, growing in the class.  It was an awesome semester and the students were a lot of fun to teach–I never dreaded going to class.  Semesters like this remind me why I love teaching so much–even if I only adjunct for a couple of courses a year.

Newspapers – the most well-rounded of primary sources

Newspapers provide one of the most thoroughly fascinating and insightful snapshots of an era, including both the major news items and advertisements.  How the major news items are covered is always interesting, but the advertisements, while often entertaining, also speak to the consumers, market, and companies operating in that age.  Additionally, the smaller tidbits can fill in the blanks about leisure activities and cultural norms/deviations.

Earlier this year, I acquired a handful of newspapers from the UK company Historic Newspapers (http://www.historic-newspapers.co.uk/).  The company provides a service of supplying historical newspapers for gifts (i.e.: newspaper from the recipient’s birthday) and educators.  Their supply includes both originals and reproductions from around the world, but the bulk being from the U.S. and the U.K.  Their staff includes a dedicated research team.  Educational support packs are available free of charge!

To purchase from them, follow the link and use this discount code: 15TODAY

One of the newspapers I acquired was from the day of Queen Elizabeth’s coronation, June 2, 1953.  Take a look at Edmund Hillary’s successful journey to Mt. Everest’s pinnacle, the coronation route and service, murder, comics, and advertisements:

The Front Page story

The Coronation

Other News Items

Radio and TV schedule

(This was the first televised coronation and the decision to televise it provided a huge boost to the television industry.)

Comics and Crossword Puzzle

Advertisements

It is a great way to take stock of an era in one single snapshot, one single day’s news.  (The next paper I highlight will be the UK coverage of the lunar landing–stay tuned!)

Forging Ahead, Greek fire through history and mechanical engineering

Tom Harris and one of the swords he made. (Photo credit: Marcus Woo, http://features.caltech.edu/features/393)

Forging Ahead

It wasn’t long ago when I realized that I was a huge nerd, a total dork, a complete geek!  Now, I have long known that I was a big history and civics dork, but it was only when I was attending NOAA’s Why Do We Explore professional development workshop at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History that I realized that I’m an enormous knowledge nerd!  (I’m pretty minimally competent when it comes to technology, so maybe I don’t get to be a geek.)

So, along those lines, I was pretty excited to read about a 2012 Caltech grad with a double major in mechanical engineering and history!  How cool is that!?  His experience brilliantly illustrates the value in multi-disciplined approaches often easily achieved through project based learning.  The intrepid student, Tom Harris, combined research of primary sources about Greek fire with modern scientific knowledge of fluid mechanics.  (Uh, AWESOME!)  He concluded that the weapon was not as effective when used by the Byzantines against the Islamic forces given the methods in naval battles, but acknowledged that his study was not definitive.  His conclusion corroborated some of the contemporary descriptions which suggested the range of Greek fire was limited.

But, let me share with you my favorite paragraph from the short article linked above:

Harris came to Caltech with an undeclared major, thinking he would study computer science. But, having been an avid Lego builder as a kid, he was drawn to mechanical engineering. He also has an interest in medieval history, which similarly dates back to his childhood—he loved pirates and knights, and both his parents were history majors—and after he took Brown’s medieval history class, his impression of the study of history changed. Instead of reading textbooks and analysis from other historians, Harris and his dozen or so classmates read and analyzed original documents.

This is what caught the young man’s imagination:  Instead of reading textbooks and analysis from other historians, Harris and his dozen or so classmates read and analyzed original documents.  The project, an undergrad thesis, resulted in good, quality, original history research.  BRAVO!!

Not only that, but Harris did it by uniting his interests–and, no doubt it took a lot of work with few overlapping core course requirements, from two different tracks.  For some reason, it is a trend in the U.S. that you either do science and math or humanities and language.  While it is one thing to suggest that individuals who do well in one track tend not to do as well in the other track, it is a mistake to encourage this artificial segregation of studies or competencies.  Harris demonstrates the limitations we self-impose on academic study and is exemplary for his cross-disciplinary pursuits.  And, he had fun!  Lots of fun!  The article quotes him as saying, ”You could say this experience was about rediscovering my inner child and finding a more mature way of exploring these interests.”

Congratulations Tom Harris on the completion of your thesis and on your graduation from Caltech in the studies of History and Mechanical Engineering!  I hope many people take notice of your example!!

Historic American Newspapers – Chronicling America (The Library of Congress)

The Hawaiian gazette. (Honolulu [Oahu, Hawaii]) 1865-1918, June 18, 1912

If you visit the Library of Congress’s (LOC) website and click on, “Historic Newspapers,” you open up a unique tool for teaching American history.  The first thing you will see is a collection of newspaper front pages, “100 Years Ago Today.”   These, of course, offer great potential as a way to scan the current events from a century ago, but it is not the only resource the site affords visitors and educators.

“Chronicling America” is a joint-effort of the Library of Congress and National Endowment for the Humanities to provide access to digitized newspapers and to digitize select others.  The intent is, of course, to provide a digital directory of such resources for American history.  The website explains the project in the following manner:

Chronicling America is a Website providing access to information about historic newspapers and select digitized newspaper pages, and is produced by the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP). NDNP, a partnership between the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Library of Congress (LC), is a long-term effort to develop an Internet-based, searchable database of U.S. newspapers with descriptive information and select digitization of historic pages. Supported by NEH, this rich digital resource will be developed and permanently maintained at the Library of Congress. An NEH award program will fund the contribution of content from, eventually, all U.S. states and territories.

To search for particular content, start by clicking on the sidebar’s link, “Recommended Topics,” (location on left upper sidebar, as seen from the screen shot, above) a large alphabetic list of topics is provided.  From here you have two options, 1) find your topic among the listed suggestions, or 2) type in a search term(s) into the box labeled, “Find,” with one of three search areas (1, “News & Current Periodical Pages,” 2, “Researchers Web Pages,” and 3, “All Library of Congress Pages”) provided in the drop down box immediately to the right and see what is provided (see at the top of the screen shot provided, below).

Topics in Chronicling America

 For example, I typed in, “Thomas Edison” in, “News and Current Periodical Pages,” and hit, “GO.”  Now, here, it gets a bit confusing.  While I did not get a direct result for, “Thomas Edison,” the man, as such, I got a topic that is related to Edison: “Early Cinema.”  This could be frustrating for some folks, but the site does function best along the topics it has prepared.  An alternative method is to search, ”Thomas Edison” in, “Researchers Web Pages,” and hit, “GO,” giving you research options from the LOC.  Not all of these results will be useful, some will be collections’ items that are not digitized, and others may be only tangentially related, such as the page for the, “Motion Picture and Television Reading Room,” which explains on its main page that:

The Library of Congress began collecting motion pictures in 1893 when Thomas Edison and his brilliant assistant W.K.L. Dickson deposited the Edison Kinetoscopic Records for copyright. However, because of the difficulty of safely storing the flammable nitrate film used at the time, the Library retained only the descriptive material relating to motion pictures. In 1942, recognizing the importance of motion pictures and the need to preserve them as a historical record, the Library began the collection of the films themselves. From 1949 on these included films made for television. Today the Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division (MBRS) has responsibility for the acquisition, cataloging and preservation of the motion picture and television collections. The Division operates the Motion Picture and Television Reading Room to provide access and information services to an international community of film and television professionals, archivists, scholars and researchers.

 The last search option from this page is to search, ”Thomas Edison” in, “All Library of Congress Pages,” and hit, “GO,” thus providing you with a wide array of materials, including lesson plans, events information and much more.  This brings up some of the same material that the last search provided, but it also includes the LOC biography of Edison and the lesson plan, “Thomas Edison, Electricity and America,” which provides some pretty interesting primary sources, though no newspaper sources (it does include magazine sources, focusing especially on advertising in select magazines).

If you are determined to cover Edison and use the Historic American Newspapers website, you still have a couple of options: 1) direct your students to the page on the 100th anniversary of something newsworthy from Edison’s career, or, if you can’t manage that, 2) use either the, “Early Cinema,” or, “Nikola Tesla,” topics.  Once you select on the topic of choice, you will first get a list of, “Important Dates,” for the topic, then, “Suggested Search Strategies,” and finally, “Sample Articles,” providing links to digitized newspaper articles.

A Nikolas Tesla article, The Times. (Richmond, Va.) 1890-1903, October 21, 1894, Page 2

The digital copy of the newspaper can be manipulated with controls in the top left corner of the view screen.  In addition to zooming in and out, turning pages, etc., one can also take snapshots with the view screen which can be copied and pasted, downloaded, or printed.  By clicking on the, “Clip Image,” link, the snap shot is opened on a new page or tab with bibliographic information from the newspaper, itself, and the link to the site.

Keep in mind when using old newspaper articles that the rules of journalism developed over time and are relatively recent guidelines, despite the upheaval and threat to such rules created by the web.  As ever, multiple sources will often reveal biases and prejudices among individual publications or authors.

Student drama brings War of 1812 home

Student drama brings War of 1812 home – baltimoresun.com.

A model of the fort as it appeared during the War of 1812.

I think theater is one of the most under-utilized history teaching tools available to teachers.  That’s why I got so excited about the performances covered by the Baltimore Sun, linked above.  Students from the Baltimore School for the Arts wrote and performed “Fighting for Freedom” about the War of 1812:

The cast and crew, all sophomores at the Mount Vernon school, researched the archives at the Maryland Historical Society for insights into the war that many call the nation’s second struggle for independence. They visited the fort several times and drew characters from ordinary people, rather than from the few made famous by the war.

~ Mary Gail Hare, “Student drama brings War of 1812 home,” The Baltimore Sun

The effort of developing a character based on a historical person, requires research into the primary sources available for that person.  It requires leaving behind one’s own world and trying to access the strangeness and differences of another culture.  While local Marylanders may be well-acquainted with life by the Chesapeake Bay, the world of Maryland during the War of 1812 is still a foreign land, beholden to rules of a different era and expectations that have been left behind in a pre-Civil War/pre-Civil Rights, pre-WWI/pre-WWII America.

Their research unearthed one Maryland militiaman’s letters home, accounts that inspired one of the scenes. Alexandra Morrell, clad in a floral dress that designer Erin Beuglass had created from a curtain, read her husband’s letters to their daughter as their enslaved servant girl shared their concerns. Students developed a love story subplot between the servant and the household’s enslaved wagoner. The scene ended with the young man pleading with the girl to run away.

“It will be hard for her to leave the family, but I think she will run off with her man to freedom,” said T’Pre Mayer, who portrayed both the girl’s hesitation and her love.

Lance Strickland, who played her suitor, said, “The war affected everybody, not just the people in history books, but even the slaves.”

~ Ibid.

The conflict of 1812, is also a different type of conflict, in many ways, than what we have become accustomed to in the modern U.S.  The War of 1812 is the only war visited upon the United States, and outside of Pearl Harbor and 9/11, the only time the United States suffer attacks among the states, themselves.  One has only the Civil War and the colonial wars (and the Indian wars) to turn to for a similar sense of foreign aggressors in and among American homes, cities, and waterways.

This sort of production helps to introduce a narrative that is an authentic representation of that foreign world.  As NPS Ranger Vince Vaise is quoted saying in “the show fills in historical gaps with credible fiction.  ’These kids are telling untold and more inclusive stories,” he said. “They show what average people were talking about in the Fells Point coffeehouses. They really have blown the dust off the history books. The school, the fort and the historical society give us a real powerhouse of history right here.’”  Emphasizing the other side of this project that I so admire: collaboration.  The archives are here, and the students and teacher put them to innovative and productive use!  (Extra props for using the name of the blog, Ranger Vaise!)

Such insights fulfilled instructors’ expectations for the project, said Norah Worthington, a costume design teacher, who wrote a pirate scene and worked with the 24 sophomores involved in the production.

“They put together a picture of what those of that era faced,” she said. “They focused on everyday people, not the famous, and showed how events affected them. The stories make the war personal.”

The drama helped the teenagers understand the local significance, too, she said.

“The scenes played out on streets these students walk every day,” Worthington said.

One scene focuses on the riots that broke out on city streets. Again, the students presented a new perspective — that of an assertive woman. Calla Fuqua played the normally docile wife of a shipping merchant, prompted by the war to disagree publicly with her husband. Their encounter occurred on Charles Street, where she finds him safe after a night of rioting.

“The war was about freedom of speech, bringing Canada into the union and impressing American sailors,” she said. “I think even the women had to speak up.”

~ Ibid.

This is a new day for these students, many of whom may have had no interest in history before the project who have now experienced it on multiple levels: 1) they have experienced researching history–just as historians do–with primary sources; and 2) they have created an experience of the historical era through their performance, introducing themselves and viewers to the people of a foreign time in our community’s history; introducing them to the concerns about conflict; introducing them to the mores of a society that continued to grapple with slavery, a young government, and other problems that we sometimes struggle to relate to otherwise.

We should be doing more of this sort of learning.  Take the talents that students have or are eager to develop and make use of them in education.

100 Years Later: Ways to Teach About the Titanic

100 Years Later: Ways to Teach About the Titanic With The Times – NYTimes.com.

100 Years Later Ways to Teach About the Titanic With The Times - NYTimes.com

So, the Titanic has sailed back onto our horizons, for at least a little while.  The link above will take you to the New York Times education page.  On it, you will find links to primary sources from the Titanic’s sinking, including articles from the paper’s archives.  There are a variety of suggestions, such as: making scrapbooks or mock Facebook pages (try MyFakeWall.com) which are neat ideas–easily incorporated into an existing history program or as a stand alone activity.  And, this brings up an important decision for history teachers wanting to do something with the Titanic.

What are you doing with the Titanic: Is it an opportunity to take advantage of history being covered in the news, or does it work well with what you are covering in your class already, or is it something that you simply feel compelled to cover, or is it a means to actually cover current events?  Another relevant question: Are you going to simply do a fact-finding project, a history project driven by a particular question, or a project that evaluates other disciplines either in an isolated way or in a multi-disciplined approach, such as science, engineering, or sea-exploration?

I always consider the anniversaries of particular events as interesting opportunities in teaching history, but they are also potentially awkward prospects that could unsettle the flow of the class if they do not fit in logically. Sometimes there is no real way to introduce these moments without a natural gap, such as in-class activities just before a major test or due date while students are working on tasks at home, or immediately after such a date when students are a bit exhausted.

Of course, if you are already discussing the era, then so much the better.  This is a great opportunity to evaluate Edwardian issues of class, the lingering perception of invincibility for imperialists and innovators of industry, the era’s perceptions of gender, an evaluation of the early 20th century’s media and connection with perceptions of disaster, or a more general consideration of communication developments in the age.

One of the resource links from the NY Times article: RMS Titanic Victims of the Titanic Disaster

If you are going to utilize the Titanic tragedy in class, do it with a purpose.  Be cognizant of the event’s social and cultural cache.  It may be the perfect moment to capture and wow students with a degree of interest that is sometimes hard to achieve in history classes.  Try assigning each student a person through the stories, wooing them into the drama of the past.  Provide them with multi-media sources to explore the moments they are reading about.

If your student, Tommy, reads about a young lady who gushed over dancing in the ballroom and seeing the view from her balcony, and then let him explore the underwater scene of the ballroom, today, there is a real opportunity to draw him into an experience he may have never had before.

If your student, Natalie, follows the excitement and worries of a family who put everything into this trip to immigrate to America and their struggles to keep the family together during the tragedy, complete with subsequent census records for the family after the survivors made it to the States, she may develop an interest in the nitty-gritty she never knew she was capable of sharing.

If your student, Devon, takes a look at one of the socialites who is in the newspapers leading up to the voyage and then considers his or her experience during the voyage and its disaster, they will get a personal “in” and learn a little bit about class status in the era.

This is a potential trigger moment, that can really open the world of the past in a way that other events often do not, especially for older students who are more likely to know something about the Titanic.

Titanic 100 Years -- National Geographic Channel

Additional resources:

The NY Times piece from above: 100 Years Later: Ways to Teach About the Titanic With The Times – NYTimes.com.

The BBC has interviews with survivors–great primary sources, but don’t forget the effect of history and time impacting the memory of those interviewed.

Teachinghistory.org provides a useful movie review of the James Cameron’s Titanic which is short enough to be used easily in conjunction with the movie (also complement the Hollywood experience with primary sources!!).

HistoryTech.wordpress.com offers some tech resources for Titanic lesson plans.

Larry Ferlazzo also has a collection of “The Best Sites for Learning About the Titanic.”

The History Channel’s website also has a series of articles, clips and interactive materials on its Titanic Topic’s page.

Teaching history without a history degree

Obviously, the best case scenario for every teacher is that they have a degree in the subject or field that they are teaching.  But, for a variety of reasons, that simply is not always possible.  (I am clearly speaking about primary and secondary education, here.)  This post is addressed to those earnest educators working at museums, schools, home schools, historical reconstruction sites, memorials, and similar placements who seek to teach history better, despite a lack of training in the field.

First note, that this post is filed under the category of “Experiencing History” and that I have no “History Education” category on my blog despite frequently writing about it.  Simply put, I believe that “Experiencing History” should be synonymous with “History Education.”  By this, I mean that history education should comprise of history research, writing, and presentation on the one hand, complemented by experiences in historical reconstruction on the other whether it is through food, sport, drama, music, travel, presentations, or recreated experiences.  Naturally, this is revised according to level of learning, but experiential learning in history is far more rewarding and lasting than simply being told what happened when, and, oh by the way, kindly memorize that and regurgitate it for me later.  (I’m not castigating tests here, but I do firmly believe that some tests are far superior to others.)  Being a historian is also “experiencing history” because real historians stopped using textbooks the moment they entered real academic training; instead, they read scholarly works infused with passion about the subject (usually passionate, anyway), researched primary sources, and wrote presentations of arguments about their findings.

So, in order for the above to be possible, the teacher has to have certain knowledge and resources.  One thing I want to do in this post is recommend some resources and suggest the best methods for achieving the desired knowledge.  I also recommend you read the following two posts, if you are new to the field: “A metaphor to explain what historians do” and “Primary sources and getting some context” (these may also give you some ideas for exercises–many other “Experiencing History” posts will also recommend exercises).

BOOK RESOURCES

If the books you read about your subject frequent the fancy display cases at Barnes and Noble–unless it is a university bookstore–you should be wary.  Popular history is written for entertainment and revenues, but seldom for peer review!  This is really important!  Peer review means that other experts in the field have reviewed it, as opposed to newspaper or magazine reviewers who are not historians.  One of the values in getting journals (or getting access to journals) is that they include the peer review, such as the American Historical Association’s The American Historical Review, which has the benefit of covering the vast range of historical sub-studies and eras.  Going to university library and accessing a database such as JSTOR allows you to search for reviews specifically on topics.  This effectively gives you a list of quality history books on your subject (along with their strengths and weaknesses).  It will also give you an introduction into historiography which is the history of what historians have argued regarding your topic and an important insight into how history works and how our understanding evolves.

Another avenue is to skip Barnes and Noble and go to peruse the catalogs, online or print, of publishers who specialize in academic books.  These include university presses, of course, and also academic publishing arms such as Bedford’s, Palgrave, Blackwell, Modern Library (their “College Editions”), and Penguin (though, they publish a lot of popular stuff, too, so be discerning or look for their academic publications–they also have many useful translations of primary sources).  I would still avail yourself of reviews, especially if you are new to the field, but these should be safe for their information.  Once you’ve got good books, start paying attention to their footnotes/endnotes and their sources, both primary and secondary–this is literally your paper trail, and while you probably cannot replicate or follow every lead practically, you can cross-reference and learn about the subject’s evolution in our understanding.

Some of you may ask why you can’t you rely on the history textbook?  At least two reasons: 1) textbooks aren’t very good (for a full explanation of this read the following: “Why you are allowed to be suspicious of history textbooks”), and, 2) your students already have the textbook, so you aren’t providing anything that they can’t already teach themselves if they simply read the textbook–admittedly there opportunities for refining reading skills, but that is not enough of an excuse as you can do that with any reading assignment.  Some of you may be faced with required texts that you are assigned and that’s fine, but don’t be a slave to them.  Once you have educated yourself, the inherent limitations of the textbooks become mind-expanding teaching tools themselves.

But, before you really get into your subject learn more about the field itself.  Some of the books I am about to suggest, are aimed at students.  If you do not have extensive formal training in history, then it is worth considering yourself a student, too.  (Actually, the best teachers never stop thinking of themselves as students, no matter how many years of experience they may have.)  I should clarify why it is important to learn about the field itself: have you ever heard of teaching science without also teaching the Scientific Method or performing experiments to learn chemistry or physics?  Of course not!  Science counts on transparency of method so that each experiment and its findings can be reproduced.  Academic history functions, more or less, the same way–except that history involves a lot more grey area and interpretation of findings–but for some reason history is limited in the early years of education to the very dry transferal of “historical facts” (which, as we see, are often not fact at all–read the link about textbooks above!).

So, this is why your job requires getting good information about your subject and demonstrating transparency of method for your students.  Once they learn the methodology, you will find it makes them more critical readers who grow into citizens requiring a trail of evidence not just random assertions by someone claiming to know something.  (In other words, you are teaching them the skills that will remove them from the gullible e-mail chain population and make them critical of political spoutings and commentary.)  The books below will help get you initiated into the field, but it will take your own leg work to discover the books you need for the history subject you are teaching–by the way, your reading requirement doesn’t end as long as you are teaching: historiography!  What we know is constantly evolving!

Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the Past (Critical Perspectives On The Past), Sam Wineburg–*Anyone teaching history, should read this book, even with historical training!

From Reliable Sources: An Introduction to Historical Methods, Martha Howell & Waltern Prevenier

A Student’s Guide to History, Jules R. Benjamin

A Pocket Guide to Writing in History, Mary Lynn Rampolla

Essaying the Past: How to Read, Write, and Think about History, Jim Cullen

Writing History: A Guide for Students, William Kelleher Storey

Reading History: A Practical Guide to Improving Literacy, Janet Allen and Christine Landaker *Use this book with an eye to any reading assignment–not textbooks.

Thinking History, Peter N. Stearns *This was published by the American Historical Association along with countless other useful booklets on historical thinking, comparative history, historiography and teaching history.

There are other good books, of course, but this a good list to get you started!

ONLINE RESOURCES

The web provides far less reliable secondary source material about most subjects than it advertises.  (This should not be a surprise!)  If you are trying to find accurate historical information written by competent historians online, your best bet is to pursue academic sites, National Park Service sites (although the quality is variable and lacks an academic standard to be universally applied, these websites are still the product of folks with an intimate knowledge of their Park and often who have some historical training in their background), preservation sites, and those of professional historical associations.  The most difficult area, at least for American history, will be the Civil War, which is awash with amateur historians, often infused with regional prejudices; this would be followed by our colonial history which has become overwhelmed by modern day, political commentary, and is, thus, propagated by amateurs with a modern political agenda.  (Note: I am abstaining from commenting on modern politics and merely discussing the quality of the history.)

Search engines also complicate things.  When you type a query into your search engine, you get the most popular sites–not the best sites–at the top.  Most search engines will let you refine the url type you are searching.  In other words, you can search for your subject but only among .gov or .edu websites, for example.  Some of the sites below include useful secondary information, while others specialize in primary source information.

Of course, there are also documentaries online (and TV), but here especially be critical!  Documentaries often include valuable information and interviews with historians, but they also are usually directed and produced by non-historians in the entertainment industry.  The film genre, more than any other(!), is for entertainment–even National Geographic will emphasize treasure over good history because people will be more interested in gold!  The minute someone sets about making a film, the first goal is always entertainment.  This is the nature of supply and demand for film: busy people, inexperienced people, or lazy people who still have an interest in history are targeted, because they want to know about the subject via great footage and in the space of an hour. Furthermore, they tend to portray a unified interpretation of a subject, which is fairly impossible in history.  Scholars come to well-reasoned, but different conclusions, so the films tend to perpetuate the myth of cold-hard historical fact.  I’m not saying they are useless, but documentaries have inherent flaws because of their goals that you should understand in advance.

The websites below will build on the reading I recommended above and augment individual subject studies.  They will do slightly different things for you which I attempt to clarify.  There are other websites out there, but these are a good start.

A Student’s Online Guide to History Reference Sources - This is an online source that goes with the Jules R. Benjamin book above.

Resources for Teachers at All Levels - American Historical Association, teaching resources–they really serve teaching and pedagogy, so take advantage!

The AHA and K-16 Teaching - American Historical Association, teaching resources.

teachinghistory.org - National History Education Clearinghouse: includes exercises, primary sources, and historian interviews.

Internet History Sourcebooks Project by Paul Halsall of Fordham University – Primary sources, with some secondary source reference material and maps.

And some useful blogs:

History Tech - Teaching resources blog with an eye to technology.

The History Channel This is Not… - Great posts on pedagogy from a trained historian who is teaching.

Brush off the Dust! History Now! – This blog.

Why you are allowed to be suspicious of history textbooks

History textbooks are dubious things.  On the one hand, they are often large, written in uniform, rather mechanical style, by multiple authors, covering far too broad a range of history, and exceedingly dry.  On the other hand, they are transmitting a single, unified, uncontested narrative of past events without revealing the methods that led to their compiling.  They are really unique animals in the world of history.  Historians are constantly talking about primary and secondary sources: a) primary sources being those texts written by contemporaries  or near-contemporaries of researched events and individuals; b) secondary sources being those books, papers, and presentations produced by professional historians as the result of their research.  Textbooks rank in their own category for me: tertiary sources.  (I also put documentaries in this category as they are frequently catering to TV ratings and rarely directed and produced by professional historians.)

"You can read this without falling asleep? It doesn't even tell you how we know that!"

Tertiary sources

There are several problems with the further removed, tertiary source that we all used in school.  Some of these have already been referenced:

• they are dry (aka: boring)
• they are both incredibly condensed and incredibly long
• they are frequently written by multiple people, and yet in one voice
• they are several times removed from the passion of detecting and discovery inherent in the real field of history
• they reveal nothing of their methods
• they tell people “what happened” supplying “historical facts”–things which don’t precisely exist in the real field of history

Of these, I will lump the first three together, the fourth follows naturally from them, and the fifth naturally from the fourth, but the final point I will address in the following section of the post.

Textbooks are often dull reads.  They are dry.  They sometimes tease us about something we find interesting, but they do not deliver ending the subject before our questions have been answered.  (From my own experience, I can recall the incredibly unsatisfying two paragraphs written about the fascinating North African, Muslim explorer Ibn Battuta, who covered twice the ground as Marco Polo, before Marco Polo did it.  To further compound my frustration, there was no further or recommended reading provided for him.)  This can have a rather stultifying effect in a young and curious student.  Part of the reason for this is the need to create one (dull) voice to unify the contributions of multiple authors.  There are multiple authors because the text book must cover such long and unwieldy period of time, which further results in the minimizing many important points in history.  This further often also results in the exclusion of various sub-fields of history, that leaves a rather minimalist, narrative account, touching on many things but going into detail on few.

Thus, if a historian is passionate about his or her work–which we typically are since we find it interesting, spend a ridiculous amount of money on learning it, and then hope to continue doing it for a living–none of the passion of discovery or enlightenment comes through in the reading of the textbook.
That is, in fact, frequently sanitized from the text.  The individuality of the scholar is, for that matter, sanitized from the text.  Of course, the adventure of history, the methodology which leads historians to their various conclusions is all together absent.  This is problematic in itself, as sharing one’s methodology is an integral part of every other academic history publication except the textbook.  For some reason, there exists a current of thought which does not require that students be initiated into the real thing but simply swallow what they are assigned to read without question.  This heavy-handed approach seems ill-fit to our democratic society.  This leads, finally, to the next point.

Undisputed narratives

History is not a unified, uncontested, all-agreed upon narrative of fact.  None of us were around when Thucydides, Augustus, Ghengis Khan, Charlemagne, Sulyman, Napoleon, or George Washington walked and talked and acted out their lives.  What happened, why it happened, how it happened, and who was involved is frequently contested among leading historians.  One book about John Adams will reveal a different man than another book that covers him.  Not only is this text book approach to history stultifying,  it is also misleading in representing how we know about the past and at times outright manipulative.

When someone tells another what happened in the past, it can shape one’s present and future.  It is simply dangerous to society to have an American history book that misrepresents the past.  In the 1990s, one of Howard Zinn’s students, James W. Loewen, stirred the waters with a book entitled, Lies my Teacher Told Me.  (Zinn and Loewen have their own agendas, but that does not negate some of the essential points Loewen addressed.)  Lowen described his attempt to get his Mississippi state history textbook published with a lynch mob photograph.  Loewen wrote the following:

Lynch mobs often posed for the camera.  They showed no fear of being identified because they knew no white jury would  convict them.  Mississippi: Conflict and Change, a revisionist state history textbook I co-wrote, was rejected by the Mississippi State Textbook Board partly because it included this photograph [a bleary black and white photo of a group of white men around a fire, with a dark figure appearing in the fire].  At the trial that ensued , a rating committee member stated that material like this would make it hard for a teacher to control her students, especially a “white lady teacher” in a predominantly black class.  At this point the judge took over questioning.  ”Didn’t lynchings happen in Mississippi?” he asked.  Yes, admitted the rating committee member, but it was all so long ago, why dwell on it now?  ”It is a history book, isn’t it?” asked the judge, who eventually ruled in the book’s favor.

~ Lies my Teacher Told Me, caption p. 167

History written with a particular agenda in mind is common among history professionals and their books, but unlike standard textbooks they are required to be upfront about their agenda and their intentions–this is why you should really read the introduction and the concluding chapter!!!  Textbooks are written with agendas all the time, but seldom explain that agenda–indeed, one imagines explaining it would be counterproductive–nor, do they explain issues for which contesting conclusions exist, regardless of the prevalence of the debate within the field.

As a result, even when there is less of an agenda intentionally built into the program of state-taught history, there is nevertheless a misleading and sometimes dated single narrative.  One of the best examples of this from my own specialization is the evolution of our understanding of feudalism.  I have yet to see a textbook deal with the questions raised about our traditional understanding of feudalism–comprised of conclusions made in the middle of the last century–despite encountering textbooks that would were written this century.  How backward can you be in educational discipline?

"So, how does this relationship work, again?"

Beyond the intro-level history classes, college-level history courses abandon textbooks for history monographs written by historians with peer reviews and transparency (ok, some of these are badly written, too, but they are usually academically honest, at least).  They must also account for the historiography of their subject, that is, the conclusions and evolutions in our knowledge of it, which addresses the differences of learned opinion and demonstrates the methodology for effectively concluding about the past.

Distinguishing characteristics of change and continuity among periods

Despite the changes from one era or culture to the next, there are often similar types of texts that show up throughout different periods.  The way that these texts evolve is reflective of the culture producing them, as such they can be really useful tools in charting change and continuity over time.  A compare and contrast exercise of this type is also valuable for reviewing past material.  Texts can include laws, speeches, biographies, histories, fiction, etc.  It can also be applied to art or music, whether religious, public or private.

There are different ways to do this.  One is to send your students off on a scavenger hunt in the library to find the primary sources and to write a compare and contrast essay, asking them to identify the features of the text that place it in a particular time, era or culture.  If you have been working with these sorts of texts all along than you can include a review assignment.  Venn diagrams can be used, but I also am a big fan of students writing in the cultural style of one or another, or switching styles within in a story.  Possibly, my favorite is a Mad Libs exercise.

The Mad Libs has the advantage of emphasizing certain vocabulary, while being a shorter, more condensed assignment than a larger writing project.  For example, in my Western Civilization class, I assigned excerpts from Roman Vitae (Lives) which were biographies of various famous men (for the most part) extolling or castigating their virtues and actions, thus revealing the societal mores.  Romans wrote about everyone from Alexander the Great to Hannibal to Julius Caesar.  Early Christians, living under Roman rule, adopted this practice for holy men, writing sacred Vitae.  These differed in several identifiable ways: 1) Early Christian Vitae were, well, Christian while Roman Vitae were pagan (until the conversion of Constantine); 2) Early Christian samples were typically shorter than their Roman counterparts; 3) Early Christian virtues included martyrdom, ascetic living and often included desert seclusion or giving up Roman secular living and offices for roles in the church, whereas Roman virtues were concerned with leadership; and, 4) the “characters” surrounding the Early Christian subjects were also slightly different, involving Church officials, than the Roman subjects who typically involved soldiers and senators.

The evolution of the Vitae continues into the Late Antique era and then the Early and Late Medieval eras.  The Late Antique stories focus on conversion and monastic withdrawal, with less emphasis on martyrdom, though it remains a theme.  By the Early Medieval, particularly surrounding Charlemagne, there is a revival in the Roman style of Vitae, but with Christian markers, such as churches, church hierarchy and, of course, certain Early Medieval realia and institutions instead of some Roman examples.  The Late Medieval, meanwhile, describes a new type of Christian living, the Vitae Apostolica, which is patterned on the apostles in the Acts of the Apostles and Jesus in the Gospels.  These Vitae stress preaching, serving the poor and sick and active involvement among God’s flock instead of withdrawal and seclusion.  Below are some examples of different Vitae from these different eras that I have used (typically in excerpts):

ROMAN

• Plutarch’s Lives
• Suetonious’s Lives

EARLY CHRISTIAN

• Eusebius on Constantine (in his ecclesiastical history)
• The Lives of Desert Fathers
• St. Anthony

LATE ANTIQUE

• Sulpicius Severus’s Life of St. Martin
• Gregory of Tours on Clovis’s conversion
• Bede’s Life of Cuthbert

EARLY MEDIEVAL

• Einhard’s Life of Charlemagne
• Notker’s Life of Charlemagne

LATE MEDIEVAL

• Life of St. Francis of Assisi
• Life of St. Roch

The Mad Libs looked like this:

Vitae Mad Libs

Roman               Late Antique                   Carolingian

_______1_______

Adj. (describing the individual of the Vita)

_______2_______

Adj. (describing the individual of the Vita)

_______3_______

Vb. (describing an action of the individual)

_______4_______

Vb. (describing an action of the individual)

_______5_______

N. (person, deity, group)

_______6_______

N. (person, deity, group)

_______7_______

N. (situation, event)

_______8_______

N. (time of day, event)

_______9_______

Vb.

_______10_______

N. (person, deity, group)

Vita

The _1_ man was _2_.  He _3_ other nations.  He always ­_4_ to _5_ in the morning earning the admiration of _6_.  When _7_ happened in the _8_ he was the first to _9_ his _10_.

This was a short exercise, part of a larger homework assignment, that asked the students to think about the differences in vocabulary that marked this largely laudatory style of composition.  It asked them to further assess the different values of each society.  Students can be asked to select one time period, or can be asked to create separate samples for each period—particularly in this case, as there are only ten words to supply for each sample Vita (singular of Vitae).

While an assignment like this can be modified to work really well with young students focusing on unit vocabulary, who may need to be reminded that ancient Romans did not have cell phones, it also works really well with more advanced students who can read more complex primary sources.  It is a simple way to explore societal norms, but it can also be a way to highlight someone who was bucking the trend if enough primary sources are engaged.  In this way, it is easy to see how this might be developed into a larger project that would cover more ground and call for a deeper analysis.  Not only that, but such an analysis may also reveal which authors were emulated.  A perfect example of this is the Roman historian Livy who is repeatedly emulated during the Middle Ages—especially the Late Medieval—and later in the Italian Renaissance.

Speaking of the Italian Renaissance, this is also an exercise which can emphasize that these eras we use are largely conceits, created for convenience.  The need to break the vastness of the world’s history down into easily manageable units led to the creation of all of these periods and eras.  But, they are also misleading.  Seldom does a culture in history end and abruptly shift to a new culture.  Sometimes there are momentous or catastrophic events that seem to bring to an end one era and make way for another, but it is often difficult to discern how sweeping such changes actually are at all levels of a society.  The Italian Renaissance is often advertised as one such abrupt change, but it is more often than not greatly exaggerated.  It was, for example, far less sweeping than the Muslim acquisition in the matter of a century or two of the Near East, northern Africa and Spain.  All of the attributes of the Italian Renaissance began their development in the 1100s, from cities to economics, and from Roman revival in learning to art.  The biggest difference would be revealed in the artwork and the development of the humanistic attitude that identified everything before it as lacking, until one got so far back as the Romans themselves—an attitude adopted by many subsequent generations of scholars.  Europe never let go of Rome, however, and it continually returned to Roman writers and precedent.

Another challenge of eras and periods is the experience of those living in the different eras and periods.  That is, did everyone experience the Carolingian Renaissance?  How far reaching was it in its society?  What about the people of the 12^th Century Renaissance, or the Italian Renaissance?  Did the experiences of women change?  What about slaves?  None of these considerations damns the usage of periods and eras, but they should encourage us not to be slaves to our constructs.  This is a useful challenge for students and can be introduced in different ways.  These can build off exercises like those suggested above, or can be independently employed.  One way to do this is to emphasize who is writing the sources in the unit’s corpus?  Some of the eras I mentioned were limited in authorship to Church officials—monks, bishops, etc.  Others are more broad.  Also, who was the audience?  By the Late Medieval and the 12^th Century Renaissance, women are already increasingly being included in both authorship and audience.

These sorts of source exercises really challenge students to think about our ability to access different members in society and the limits of the sources perspectives.  It is useful as a thought experiment to ask students to think about what other types of sources a culture might produce—and then supply some samples for review.  Court records, for example, are often a good way to access the experiences of the illiterate, but these have their limits, too.  Archaeology also provides added perspectives.  As do art and music to a degree.

A paper vs. digital rant

Or, why I love (love!) paper

(Book Autopsies series, Brian Dettmer)

I write a blog.  A blog is short for “web log” and represents a unique forum in communication on the web’s agora.  I do not pay to maintain my blog and you do not pay to read it, but this free-of-cost illusion does not come cheaply.  The energy cost is not free.  The cost to the environment is not green.  And, the publication of the blog is not lasting.  It is convenient and contributes to a much higher output, but it is transient and only accessible via technology.

This post is a bit of rant, really, about the impermanence of our information, today, and it considers the paperless myth and the hidden costs to our society.  As a historian, my work depends on archives and libraries; as a teacher, adopting the Iroquois proverb about taking care unto the seventh generation, I want to see that future historians are able to continue to delve into the past, our past.  Speaking of the seventh generation, it really is a myth that the paper industry will destroy the planet’s green by wiping forests from the face of the earth–quite the opposite, in fact.  And, finally, shunning paper creates a real problem and inequity in our society–even cheap technology costs more to purchase and operate than paper!  Furthermore, our youth and society at large lose something when they do not slow down long enough to take the time to read and write with paper.  It effects our brain and our thinking.

Let me say that I am not a Luddite!  I love technology!!  I just don’t want it to replace my hands and my brain completely.  After all, I do write a blog and very much enjoy the blogs of others!  It is the best way for me to get headline news and stay up to date with many of my hobbies, such as sports, but I’d rather sit down and read a newspaper at the coffee shop to get the depth in coverage.  But, even as I revel in technology’s accessibility, I print out most things I am going to read that are longer than a few paragraphs.

Historians and paper.

(Book Autopsies series, by Brian Dettmer)

Historians need sources!  As a result, they need their paper!  You may well argue that just as methods for producing data evolve, so, too, will the methods of research with digital material.  Certainly, future historians will no doubt include technicians who can perform autopsies on obsolete 3×5 floppies, but nevertheless much will be lost before they have the opportunity.  How many people have sought to take their old Word Perfect files off their IBM 360?  If the files were not printed, they were probably not saved.

As the Paper Because campaign points out, paper just lasts longer!  The Gutenberg Bible still exists today!  Any document that was written out by hand on paper or a paper-like substance, such as velum or papyrus has a shot, because it could be saved.  How else we do we have the writings of Greeks, Romans, Persians, Chinese, Japanese, etc.?

(Book Autopsies series, by Brian Dettmer)

Our personal histories are being lost with each successive computer crash–we do not even print out our photographs anymore!  I was first acquainted with this concept when I met a grad student my freshman year of college in the library studies program who, in working with the university archive, remarked that such archives across the country were finding it increasingly difficult to keep records on college life because e-mail had already begun to replace letters.  This was in the fall of 1999.  I no longer have access to my college e-mails or instant messages.  The e-mails were lost  due to a fatal computer hacking of the college’s computer systems.  The only ones I have,  I printed and stored with my letters from my childhood.  This is everyone’s story.  Think of school assignments that are entirely lost (sometimes before they’ve been handed in) because of a computer glitch or crash.  Some of these not only reflect the student’s hard work, they include personal creations that can’t be recovered.  I won’t speak for others, but in my family we kept stories and projects because they were on paper and were stored in our file or brag book.

Humans will produce an exponentially greater amount of data than ever before (think of all those Tweets and text messages), but will save a negligent amount of it in the upcoming years.  It will distort our memory and legacy.

Print is Green.

(Book Autopsies series, by Brian Dettmer)

You are forgiven for thinking that avoiding paper-use saves trees–it is a very popular theory–but, you are wrong.  It is, in fact, quite the opposite.   The paper industry insures the health of forests.  Without the demand for paper, which is the least wasteful product produced from trees, forest land would be sold off to developers, leveled and become a construction site, confining forest land to preserves.

(Book Autopsies series, by Brian Dettmer)

As an industry and as a final product, paper also conserves energy.  Reading a book, writing a letter, painting a picture or developing a photograph (on paper) costs little or no energy once the book, stationary, and paper has been manufactured.  Furthermore, these industries are leaders in energy-efficiency and recycling.  So, be green!!  Do something good for the earth!  Use paper products!!  (Below, are sites devoted to this concept with cited information.  In fairness, many of them come from the paper industry, but their arguments and sources make for a compelling argument.)

The costs of abandoning paper.

(Book Autopsies series, by Brian Dettmer)

There are two main costs I want to consider: 1) the resulting divide between those who can afford technology and those who cannot; and, 2) the stunting affect excessive technology can have on brain development.  Both of these concepts represent a real loss to society in slightly different ways.

By reducing paper–particularly in the case of the government and its sundry departments–we reduce access for the portion of our population that cannot afford smart phones or computers, nor have access to such technology at school or work.  While libraries offer a slight reprieve, they are not equipped or funded to cover the entire demographic.  The internet is a great resource in democratic society, but when the IRS decides that its tax forms are no longer available at the post office, and that one must go online to get said forms, the internet becomes an unintended class weapon.  The paperless revolution takes on a eugenic-like quality where the poor are once again sacrificed in the name of progress in general and green progress in particular regardless of whether it is intended or accidental.

(Book Autopsies series, by Brian Dettmer)

But, there is more lost.  There is a diminishing return in the development of the young brains.  Sure, we do not experience the same astonishing development that Lynne Truss reported took place in New Zealand.  There, students were permitted to hand in class work and tests in what I like to call text-speak (Eats, Shoots and Leaves).  But, nonetheless, there is evidence to show that students’ brains learn something special when they are forced to do slow reading as opposed to exclusively internet-scanning.  And, again, brains develop more completely when forced to write by hand as opposed to typing everything.  We still, rightly, refer to written works created by the act of writing, whereas we never refer to typed materials or typing–just typos!   (Having said that, my sixth-grader spends useless computer lab hours toodling around on the internet and has yet to rise above chicken-pecking her assignments on the computer!  Surely, if they are going to be on the computers in school anyway, and are assigned large projects that must be typed at least several times a year, then they can take the time to teach them typing!!)

Handwriting has been linked time and again to cognitive development.  This thinking ability, the capability to make connections and to problem-solve, is something I have to guide my students through each semester in community college history classes.  It is frustrating to know that the seventh graders I taught at the all-boys private school were more literate and capable of cognitive thinking then the majority of my students at the college level.  Key practices and training are being missed at earlier levels, stunting development.

Today, students cannot typically process lengthy textual information–even at the collegiate level where they must.  By lengthy, I do not refer in my [collegiate teaching] experience to books or textbook chapters, but long articles.  They seem to struggle to focus on anything even that long.  This is in part symptomatic of little practice, and is exacerbated by confining themselves to reading texts, Tweets and internet pages and posts.

Not only does this inhibit youth development, it retards and diminishes adult brains as well.

***

 

(Book Autopsies series, by Brian Dettmer)

So, hail paper!  Hail books!  Hail slow reading!  Hail paper tax forms and ballots!  Hail writing with a Ticonderoga No. 2 pencil!  Hail photographs printed and framed!  Hail watercolor paintings!  Hail the glorious tactile sensation of fondling a book you are about to savor!  Hail postcards!  Hail archives and primary sources!  Hail newspapers with articles longer than two paragraphs!  Hail printed journals!  Hail diaries!  Hail printed sheets of music and a group of people making music together!  Hail printers and book binders!  Hail memory and legacy!  Hail recycling and forests!  Hail the unhackable!  Hail note-taking!  Hail research papers, theses and dissertations printed and bound!  Hail paper!!

Recommend reading on this subject:

(Feel free to print stuff out and read it at your leisure!!)

Preserving history

This is not a new area of concern for libraries and archives.  In 2006, in an article, “Fragile digital data in danger of fading past history’s reach” (The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, June 7) reported on the problems encountered by the Library of Congress and the National Archive Records and Administration.  Contact the archive at your alma mater or make inquiries at any collection that maintains primary sources and get the scoop!  Librarians are not shy–they’ll tell you!

Keeping green

Start with these sites:

Paper Because: http://www.paperbecause.com/

Print Grows Trees: http://printgrowstrees.com/

Choose Print: http://www.chooseprint.org/

Learning better

On slow reading I recommend, “The art of slow reading” and “Slow Reading: An antidote for a fast world?”.

On the link between handwriting and cognitive development I recommend, “How writing by hand makes kids smarter”, “How handwriting trains the brain” and “Writing by hand helps the brain”.

forests