awesome stories
Learning about history through excellent stories that icnlude primary documents, images, video, and audio to enhance learning. excellent resource.
His key episodes are based not around a grand organising narrative but a series of vignettes that make compelling stories.
If history is popular on TV, it can be made popular at school.
Teachers developed new methods, shifting away from chronology and narrative to topics and themes, where the emphasis was placed on "skills" of analysis over the regurgitation of facts.
without providing any connecting narrative thread that explains their relationship with each other. The solution is a return to narrative history, to a big story that will organise and make sense of historical experience.
Nonetheless, it remains an announcement that tells us more about the contradictions of government thinking and its reductive view of the humanities and social sciences than it does about the state of history teaching in our schools.
I agree with Schama that the real public value of history-teaching in schools (as in universities) lies in its capacity to re-animate our civil society and produce an engaged and capable citizenry. I disagree that good story-telling will get you there
History provides us with a set of analytical skills that are indispensable for citizens who want to understand our present conditions
We want students who aren't just entertained, but who can think critically and effectively about the world they live in.
For the creative and innovative teacher it may have been something of a constraint, but most now agree it led to a ‘golden age’ of history teaching in primary schools in the 1990s and ensured every child covered a coherent history syllabus from 11-14 without repeating topics. It also spawned a generation of excellent and accessible teaching materials and encouraged heritage organisations to provide for a standard history curriculum
Regardless this return to grand narrative and national myth goes against the very progress we as academic historians have made. History is more to do with how we think and evaluate things, the tools we use to come to conclusions than about dates and conveniently accessible stories self legitimatising the status quo.
Footnote.com is a place where original historical documents are combined with social networking in order to create a truly unique experience involving the stories of our past.
The Footnote.com collections feature documents, most never before available on the Internet, relating to the Revolutionary War, Civil War, WWI, WWII, US Presidents, historical newspapers, naturalization documents, and many more.
Footnote.com is more than just an online repository for original documents. In addition to hosting millions of records, Footnote supports a community of people who are passionate about a variety of topics relating to history.
The Freedom Center museum tells the dramatic story of the enslaved crossing over that river on the journey to freedom, assisted by men and women of all backgrounds who hated slavery and had created a secret network of escape routes that came to be called 'the Underground Railroad.'
History Pin is a site that lets teachers and students view and share their personal history in a totally new way. It uses Google Maps and Street View technology and hopes to become the largest user-generated archive of the worlds historical images and stories. History Pin asks the public to dig out, upload and pin their own old photos, as well as the stories behind them, onto the History Pin map. Uniquely, History Pin lets you layer old images onto modern Street View scenes, giving a series of peeks into the past. This is a great tool for writing compare and contrast literature and, of course, for use with a History class as well.
Colonial Sense visited the home of our first President, Mount Vernon on October 5, 2011. Our first part at the tour was taken in the interior of George Washington's Mansion. As a three year old in 1735, George lived on the property with his father, Augustine Washington, and family. Augustine acquired the property from his sister in 1726. The Mansion at Mount Vernon did not exist as we know it today, although a home existed on the site. By 1740, the property was given to George's older half-brother, Lawrence Washington. Prior to his death in 1752, Lawrence razed the original house and built a new one and one-half story home wider and longer likely on the site of the original foundation. The initials "LW" were found on a small rectangular stone in the partition wall of the Mansion basement. The stone would have been originally as a foundation corner of Lawrence's newly constructed home. It would have been moved into the wall by George Washington during the reconstruction of the basement in the 1770's.
"California as I Saw It:" First-Person Narratives of California's Early Years, 1849-1900 consists of the full texts and illustrations of 190 works documenting the formative era of California's history through eyewitness accounts. The collection covers the dramatic decades between the Gold Rush and the turn of the twentieth century.