This webpage describes a National DIgital Newspaper Program that is a partnership between the NEH and Library of Congress. It aims to provide access to internet users. THis could be a great resource for teachers to use in classrooms... often other subscriptions to databases can be licensed and quite expensive to use.
I learned about this site yesterday at the Western History Association meeting in Denver. These scholars are doing some very interesting data visualization and spatially oriented digital history.
Washington Post Magazine: D.C. 1791 to Today - Working with the Washington Post and washingtonpost.com, a team of students at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill developed a series of images to digitally illustrate the myriad changes to the architecture and landscape of Washington, D.C. since the city's inception in 1791. Working from maps, plans, drawings, and photographs, the UNC students have represented the physical history of Washington in a set of time slices, showing side-by-side views of familiar landscapes, then and now, and modeling significant changes to important buildings and monuments.">
BrainPOP is an interactive instructional tool that uses animated characters, Tim & Moby to introduce and illustrate content material for social studies, math, science, English, arts, health and technology. The interactive resources include quizzes, movies, timelines, and activity pages. Other resources include lesson plans, classroom tools, curriculum calendars, research and much more. Some of what they offer is free. Unfortunately, there is an annual fee for most of their material.
My practicum school uses this program extensively. The students really like using this program and actively engage in the material. At the moment, BrainPOP is featuring a segment on "American Indians" and "Digital Citizenship."
If you go to this location, you will find a free movie on the civil war. http://www.brainpop.com/socialstudies/freemovies/civilwar/
The Valley of the Shadow (also called the Valley Project) website is a part of the Virginia Center for Digital History at the University of Virginia. The material in the site documents the lives of two communities during the Civil War period; one community from the South and one community from the North. The site is an online library or an archive filled with primary resources such as letter, diaries, census records, government records, newspapers, speeches, maps, images and other materials. The site contains thousands of documents.
The archive is divided into three sections: The Eve of War (Fall 1859-Spring 1861), The War Years (Spring 1861-Spring 1865), and The Aftermath (Spring 1865-Fall 1870).
An example of one such document is a letter written in August, 1864 by a young militiaman to his parents telling them that he is well and that he will be sending home his pay. I have added a few lines because I find it so interesting and compelling. The letter comes from a camp near Petersburg.
Dear Parents
it is with the Greatest of Pleashure that I seat My self to inform you and My Brothers and Sisters that I like it well and am well feal Hartey like ite beter now than Ever I did I hope that youens Ar all well and all the Rest about [unclear: tomstorm] ile now state to you that I Received your Letter last Knight And was Glad to here from youens And was glad to here that Youenes wasened yet dissturbed By The Johneys Rebes you Stated in your letter that tha Wes moveing every thing out Of Town now if tha wold be men tha wold take
In the same document but another page, the young man writes about his pay.
Read this letter we ar getting Paid off to day I draw 1.20.10 that is one hundrad 20 dollars 10 cts Ile ex press 1 hundrade 10 dollars and mebbey fifteen dollars I dont want to ceep so mutch money here I cend it to you and if you want to make youse of it whi you may get the Chirldren wat ever tha want that is in the eating line And Close but you must be A littl
I ran out of room in the box above.....anyway, I am not certain what the citation rules are regarding this but I found the letter on the website that I have bookmarked, The Valley of the Shadow.
Anyway, it is a great site….there is soooo much more.
Has timelines arranged around the following:
"a) Jamestown in the Global Context
b) Journey to Jamestown - the Voyage of the Susan Constant and the first 90 days at the fort
c) Jamestown, 1606-1608
d) Virginia, 1608-1612
e) New England, 1602-1620"
Includes contemporary interviews with Native American descendants of Jamestown as well as maps of the Native American towns that predated Jamestown in this area. Also contains a Google Earth map based on the original drawings of John Smith.
"Dr. Julie Solometo researched and organized the entry on the Paspahegh Indians. What the English called Jamestown, the Indians called Paspahegh territory.. Interviews and videotaping of contemporary Indians was done by Phyannon Berkowitz, Jeffery Dalton, and Crandall Shifflett."
From the Site:
"Letters and first-hand accounts allow us to see seventeenth-century society as no other record can.
. . .
They are best approached with the questions: what are the authors trying to tell us and what are their agendas? These materials do give us a sense of the contingencies, uncertainties,and dilemmas that surrounded choices and when read critically should lead to a better understanding of what factors shaped individual decisions.
newspapers A full-text searchable database (XML) gives us a powerful tool for tracing and comparing topics, ideas, concepts, motivations, and much more from vantage points of time, space, power, authority, race, class, gender, and ethnicity"
LESSON PLANS!!!!
Some of these are even in our exact format!!!
All are on Jamestown. Lots about runaway slaves and indentured servants, some on Native American relationships.
Most make use of primary documents.
Check em out! :-)
From the website: "The Virtual Jamestown Archive is a digital research, teaching and learning project that explores the legacies of the Jamestown settlement and "the Virginia experiment." As a work in progress, Virtual Jamestown aims to shape the national dialogue on the occasion of the four hundred-year anniversary observance in 2007 of the founding of the Jamestown colony."
Each of the links here are very useful and technically more user-friendly; however I continue to bookmark this page because it has provided such a simple, straight-forward and extensive collection of links.
In looking for primary sources and documents for lesson plans, I have noticed that most of the search results center on U.S. history and its related documents. I wanted to find a website that might provide links to a broader collection of documents on world history. This website has links to European historical documents, broken down by country as well as time period. Each link leads to a collection of other links where one can search for primary documents. It's admittedly a bit curious that this website is the product of an employee of Brigham Young University; I cannot tell if this bears any reflection on websites that are linked here, but the collection is extensive.
2.
To many residents of the U.S., bullfighting looks cruel and inhumane; to many residents of Latin American and European countries, bullfighting is an artistic and noble part of their culture. What customs, institutions, or sports which seem perfectly acceptable and humane in the U.S. could be viewed as cruel and/or inhumane when viewed from another culture?
"Eric Foner, the DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University, and Olivia Mahoney, Director of Historical Documentation at the Chicago Historical Society" are cited as the authors of the page.
Reconstruction,
one of the most turbulent and controversial eras in American history,
began during the Civil War and ended in 1877.
Its difficult to sticky note everything you find interesting on an .html site such as this one, but each of these sections has images (many culled from the Library of Congress, which is also an excellent source for images such as these) pertaining to reconstruction, which a teacher could print or make part of a powerpoint presentation to enable students to analyze them.
In the "additional resources" section there is also a visual timeline of the Reconstruction period, including many of the images found throughout the rest of this website, but organized chronologically, which may be of use to those students who need to look at history in this way.
In time, the North abandoned
its commitment to protect the rights of the former slaves, Reconstruction
came to an end, and white supremacy was restored throughout the
South.
Today, as a result of extensive
new research and profound changes in American race relations, historians
view Reconstruction far more favorably, as a time of genuine progress
for former slaves and the South as a whole.
This website, while providing a fairly detailed summary of The Reconstruction, I have bookmarked because of the images it contains. I think pictures and images are a useful tool in shaping students perceptions of history; as Erin evidenced in her last lesson plan, providing students with a model for critically examining images could prove very beneficial to building on their critical thinking abilities.