Here is the report on using digital images in teaching that Ken mention in his presentation.
Here is the History Matters oral history module I mentioned during James’ presentation.
Here is the Historical Event Markup and Linking Project I mentioned (I picked a Bohemian history example).
And for only $150 you too can own a piece of the treasure from the SS Central America (sorry Kurt!).
Poland’s Cultural Identity and the East
The Baroque era (1562 – 1764) was Poland’s Golden Age. It was a time when Poland was the largest nation in Europe. Its geography lent to a crossroads of East and West; a place where Slavs, Russians, Jews, Tartars, and Ottomans influenced a culturally diverse landscape. Artistic highlights from this period include royal wares, liturgical objects, paintings of nobility and religious images, rugs and textiles including pillaged Ottoman tents, decorative glassware and ceramics, equestrian items, and Hussar armor. (more…)
My interest in history has largely been influenced by my travels over the years. When I was growing up in New Jersey, my aunt moved to Montague, New Jersey. On one of our weekend trips there, she took us on a drive along River Road; which parallels the Delaware River. As we drove along enjoying the fall scenery, I noticed a few Victorian style homes which seemed to be abandoned. I asked about them and that was my introduction to the Tocks Island Dam project. At this time (early ’80s) the dam was a non issue, but the uninhabited homes remained. I filed my curious thoughts away for a later date.
Next, when I moved to Virginia in 1998, one of our weekend excursions was to Shenandoah National Park. I had visited SNP as a teenager on a family camping trip, but now I could go there almost any time. We had lots of visitors from out of town our first few years in Fairfax, and Shenandoah was one of the favorite places to take them. On one of my trips, I picked up a book from the park bookstore about old homesteads still visible along hiking trails. The book explained how mountain families had been forced off their land to create the national park in the ’30s. I felt sad for the families…and filed more curious thoughts away for another day.
This year, as part of my summer vacation, my husband and I decided to take the path less traveled home from our summer home in Maine. We had left our teenage children in the care of their grandparents and had time to ourselves. We left time so we would not have to hurry back to Fairfax. We took a detour through southern Vermont (husband loves the mountains there) and then headed south to New York State. I have a ancestors from the Catskill area and wanted to take my part of the detour through there. Night fell as we were driving along the shores of the Ashokan Reservoir. We had stopped for dinner in a small town, but as we continued we noticed that there were almost no roads or houses near the reservoir. Every so often there would be a signpost for the “former site of…” I decided to look into what this was all about when I got home.
These three examples of places where people have been removed from an area highlight the consequences of eminent domain. I find that the project assigned for this class may be the one time I can combine these three snapshots in history together.
My plan is to examine the effects of eminent domain on the populations which are removed from an area. As a teaching exercise, I’d like students to consider the decisions which have to be made when weighing the advantages for the many (clean drinking water or recreational areas) versus the consequences to the few (those who have to leave the area).
I think that these examples are particularly noteworthy because they involve the dissolution of entire communities – not just a few households or a part of a larger community like a neighborhood. While neighborhoods are significant cultural bodies, in each of the cases I chose a functioning town or towns dissapeared forever. The memories of those towns live on through the decendents of the inhabitants, and thankfully there is information stored in newspaper archives, books and the internet about those communities. If I were trying to show a pattern, I would probably try to support a hypothesis that the use of eminent domain is used in a more judicial and less destructive manner today than in the the first half of the 20th century. In the end, I would like students to consider how they would react if the issue of eminent domain were to touch their lives. I’d like to show that it is possible to fight, but also show how the “government’s” unfettered access to lawyers and money make it hard to succeed in a practical way against a project which has the sheen of “the public good” attached to it.
I’ve got a place to begin, and most of a middle, but my ending is still in progress.
Thanks to all for your support….Michelle
First, I would like to make the comment that I believe everyone in the class has really good ideas for their final projects. What is also wonderful is that I feel our projects are more the part of a collective effort, and it is great that we all got to exchange ideas during Tuesday’s class.
My idea for the final started off quite innocently. I’ve always known that John Evelyn, the famous 17th century diarist, bares a relation to me on my grandmother’s side. I’ve always had an interest in learning more about the man, yet I’ve never found the time to read his diary; until just recently. This new found interest in Evelyn has given me direction for my final.
In short, the idea for my project is geared towards helping students learn how to read primary sources. I would like to take segments from Evelyn’s diary, Vaclav Havel’s Open Letters, and Fredrick Douglas’ writings and get students to read and analyze them. To equal out the playing field, I would also allow students to choose from women in history, such as , Florence Nightingale, Martha Ballard, Dorothea Dix, etc. The main point of this exercise would be give students the necessary tools for conceptualizing primary sources, as well as getting them to take away the “big picture” from the various writings.
To keep them interested, I would also want them to choose anyone they would like to be from history and get them to act out a certain part of a speech, letter, etc. They would be able to do this in groups to make the effort collective. Of course, their ideas would have to get approved by me, their imaginary teacher. This would be made necessary to eliminate the chance of a student choosing somebody controversial, or offensive.
I sincerely hope this will develop fully in thought as well as in practice.
What do you all think?
Here’s the skinny on my project…
I originally had the thought to use the Simile Timeline to show data from some random historical event. The interactive part would be to have the student enter their age. This would plot a static bar along the timeline so that the students could visually see what they would have lived through from that historical time frame. They would also be able to add the ages of their parents for the same effect.
After looking around for data from some historical event, I found that there is no good timeline for World War II. I did find lots of data, just no good format. So my purpose is to present a World War II timeline, but instead of going the route of showing a static bar for the students age, they will have to read a little bit about the War, some of the contentions on why some details might be more important to some people than others, and then give them the opportunity to pick the top ten most important events of World War II and generate a timeline of that. They will also have to explain why they chose the dates they did. I’ll probably limit this to a high school level, so I’ll give them 20-30 dates to choose from.
So basically the site would be 1) a description of how the interpretation of history is often relative to the researcher, 2) give the students an opportunity to order history and defend their reasons, and 3) provide a time line with as many dates as possible. I could also show how it can be important to limit the historical data in order to understand what’s going on (too many dates just make for a lot of points on a line).
I’ll probably start off with a lot of the data on the wikipedia, if I can figure an easy way to scrape all of that data.
Albany Congress of 1754 Project
The objective of the project is to provide a learning module that exposes high school or undergraduate college students to primary source documents, gives the students experience in interpreting these documents and historically thinking about the issues and decisions that faced the Indians, American colonists, and the Board of Trade in England. The module would occur sometime during the middle of a course on colonial America and is estimated to take approximately two weeks to complete. In the weeks leading up to the module we would have sessions giving the students a sense of the historical landscape from the perspective of the Indians, colonists and English in Britain. (more…)
To help everyone remember what you presented tonight, please write up a 2-3 paragraph summary of your final project and post it here. And, as you think of other suggestions for your colleagues, offer those as comments.
Don’t let the spartanesque look of the initial web page on the website fool you (http://www.virtualjamestown.org/. This project is rich in primary and secondary sources as well as ways in which both students and teachers can interact. There are ten teaching scenarios ready for use that students, or any user for that matter, can work on that require historical thinking. The maps amd images show how the area was settled and populated from 1607 onward as well as photos of aritifacts with explanations of the artifacts which allow the user to get a good idea of what kind of tools, pottery and various items were used by the Jamestown population of the 17th century. (more…)
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