The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum: Personalizing History jlee Thu, 06/13/2019 - 08:57
Video Overview

Christina Chavarria, of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM)'s Education Division, introduces teachers to the museum. She highlights the importance of using individual stories and specific artifacts to make history live for students.

Video Clip Name
holocausttour1.mov
holocausttour2.mov
holocausttour3.mov
holocausttour4.mov
Video Clip Title
Introducing the Museum
Race and Eugenics
Obstacles to Flight
Teaching with Artifacts
Video Clip Duration
5:25
3:48
2:28
4:03
Transcript Text

Christina Chavarria: So just kind of look around. What feeling is evoked? Is there anything that might remind you of something? Or maybe nothing at all. Visitor 1: We were just taking [about] the stairs. Almost as if you can be kind of spread out, and then as you go up closer you have to bunch together to file in. I've never seen stairs that do that, it's weird. Christina Chavarria: Okay, that's true. And when you mention that I think of also the train tracks and how they're kind of elongated and they fade and they seem to become more narrow the further away they become. Anybody else have any thoughts about the architecture, the building? Visitor 2: I think it's overwhelming. It makes you feel small. Christina Chavarria: That's very true. That's a very good point. Because, like I said, going back to the importance of the individual in this history, one of the things that we do with teachers is that we really encourage that you translate statistics into people, that instead of focusing solely on the millions of victims or the thousands who may have died in one place, you take those individual stories and you pull them out using primary resources. Christina Chavarria: What the purpose of these cards do, especially in a teaching standpoint, is, again, they focus on the individual. How many of you have somebody who is not Jewish? Anybody have somebody who is not Jewish? Okay, who? Visitor 3: I have Lucian Belie Brunell. He's born to Catholic parents, he's a priest. Christina Chavarria: Okay, we have a priest. Anybody else have somebody who is not Jewish, somebody who is Roma? Disabled? Okay, how about does somebody have—how many of you have somebody from Poland? Germany? Austria? Italy? France? Denmark? The Netherlands? Greece? Yugoslavia? Okay, any other place that I did not mention? Visitor 4: Romania. Visitor 5: Lithuania. Visitor 6: Hungary. Visitor 7: Czechoslovakia. Christina Chavarria: So another purpose of these is for us to see the range of geography. That this did not happen solely in Germany, even though it began there. This did not happen only in Poland. That it spread geographically. It spread all the way into Northern Africa and other parts of the world were impacted, even if they were not occupied by Nazi Germany. Christina Chavarria: Look at the monitor. TV Documentary: "—called in by radio, said that we have come across something and we're not sure what it is. It's a big prison of some kind, and there are people running all over—sick, dying, starved people. You can't imagine it, things like that don't happen." Christina Chavarria: So as we go through, as I mentioned downstairs, I'm not going to point out everything to you, but there are certain elements that I want to point out because we will talk about them in the afternoon. This, in particular, I think is very striking for us as teachers, as social studies teachers, as teachers in the United States. You notice at the top it says, "Americans encounter the camp." We don't use the word in this picture—we don't use the word "liberation." Why not? You couldn't just walk out and go home, first of all. And liberation has that connotation of being free, and yet the obstacles that lay ahead for those who did survive will be so vast—the obstacles, the challenges, for the Allied forces and relief workers who come into the camps. So, we chose that word "encounter." And this was not, as we know now, this was not the first that we knew of the camps. It was the first maybe that we had seen of the camps with our own eyes, but we will see that. When you look at this history again we define it the years 1933–1945. Christina Chavarria: Where you all came in, we call that the Eisenhower Plaza. This quote up here that's on the side of the building, of the museum structure. Because if you look at it, I think this is an excellent quote to use with students because it takes us back to that theme of anti-Semitism and that theme today of Holocaust denial.

Christina Chavarria: I think as teachers here in the United States, the issue of race science, which was very popular in the United States, it was not only in Nazi Germany. If you look at your own states—if each individual state looks at its history—you can look and see the laws that were on the books regarding sterilization, regarding who could marry whom. So, again, looking at U.S. history, especially in the latter part of the 19th century and the eugenics movement and how this became so popular. And the whole notion of race, the definition of race, and categorizing people. This is very, very relevant. Christina Chavarria: What are the questions that your students ask when you're teaching this? How many of you have taught about the Holocaust? Visitor 1: They want to know why; they want to know how could this have started? They want to know, you know, why is Hitler so anti-Jewish, anti-Semitic? They want to know the root of it all. Visitor 2: They want to know, too, why they willingly were prisoners. You know, 7th grade, why, I would have not done this— Christina Chavarria: I would have fought back, right? And they did, that's a very good issue to bring up. They did, and we have to teach about resistance. One of the questions related to that is: Why didn’t they just leave? Why didn't they just pack up and go somewhere else? Well, again, the complexities of this history—don't avoid those questions when they ask you. Why didn't, why couldn't they just pack up and leave? We look at the Évian Conference, which is where we look at the failure of other nations to respond to the growing crisis in Europe. And this symbolizes that, this political cartoon. This appeared in the New York Times, July 3, 1938, just before the Évian Conference was to begin. So we can take this image and we can deconstruct this, and what do we see happening here? Visitor 3: The guy's at a stop sign with no place to go. Christina Chavarria: The stop sign is on what? Multiple Visitors: A swastika. Christina Chavarria: Every point, every direction ends with that halt—you can't, you can't go. And who is this person? Visitor 4: Non-Aryan. Christina Chavarria: Non-Aryan, presumably Jewish—the kippah. And what's on the horizon? The Évian Conference invited nations to attend to discuss the growing refugee problem. So 32 countries send representatives to this conference, but, yet, they're also told we're not going to ask you to take any more people in. So the conference was basically a failure before it even began because only one country stepped forward and said, "We're willing to take in more refugees than what we have on our quotas, listed as our quotas." Does anybody know what that country was, what that one country was? It's right down here. The Dominican Republic. This also revealed a lot of anti-Semitic thought from leaders of other nations. Some countries said, "We don't have a Jewish problem and we don't want to import one." Some said, "We're going through our own issues." And that's very true, because we've got to contextualize this from what happened in the 1920s, what happened in 1929, the economic—the Depression as well. But, yet, we also have to factor in anti-Semitic sentiments because who are these refugees? Well, they're mostly Jewish, they might take our jobs, they might take—we don't have money to support them.

Christina Chavarria: Looking at the whole idea of refuge, and the search for refuge, where do you go when nations have closed their doors to you? Where do you go? What kind of documentation do you need to get out of Germany? What documents do you need? What kind of money do you need to emigrate? These are all issues that you have to bring up with your students so that they understand why they were trapped in Europe. Christina Chavarria: This chart that we see here, this is the forced immigration chart that Adolf Eichmann's office produced to show how it was able to expel, within three years, most of Vienna's Jewish population. After the Anschluss, after Kristallnacht, this is when Jews in the occupied territories—Germany, Austria, parts of Czechoslovak—after Kristallnacht, they realized that they can no longer stay. Life is just not bearable any more; in fact it's dangerous now. In many cases, many of them actually bought visas to get out. Some countries made money, some diplomats made money selling fraudulent visas that turned out to be no good. And that is what happened with the voyage of the St. Louis. Out of the 937 passengers who were on the boat, almost—I think all but maybe six to eight of them were Jewish. They needed to get out, and Cuba was the destination of this ship, the St. Louis. It was owned by the Hamburg line, Hamburg America. They had acquired visas to go to Cuba, where they were planning to stay until their numbers came up to come to the United States. But before they reached Cuba, their visas were rescinded; in fact, many of them were fraudulent, only about 28 of them were actually valid. So when they got to Havana, they were not allowed to dock. Only those who had valid visas, which was just a miniscule number out of the over 900 those people were allowed to stay, and the rest could not get off the boat.

Christina Chavarria: Here you see newspapers from some of the major cities across the country reporting on the front page certain events that were taking place in Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1939. Right here, for example, the Dallas Morning News: Kristallnacht, November 1938, front page. This was not a secret. Christina Chavarria: This is called "The Tower of Faces." This is one thing I want to point out to you because—just take a couple minutes to look around at the pictures. This represents one shtetl, one Jewish community, in Lithuania. The little girl right here is Professor Yaffa Eliach, she lives in New York. She went back to this shtetl, Eishyshok, and she gathered the 10,000 photos, many of which you see here, and which we have online. Again, what this does, we look at the individual; we look at the victim not as a "victim," but as a vibrant human being. I think anything we teach, whether it's the Holocaust or any other topic that we're looking at in history, we have to look at the individuals. Christina Chavarria: This milk can is one of three milk cans that was used to bury documents and chronicles of life in the Warsaw Ghetto. And in 1950, two of the milk cans were excavated as well as the other metal boxes. Within them they found a very rich documentation of what life in the ghetto was like. Christina Chavarria: Actual barracks that are on loan to us from Poland, they are not replicas. Right over here we have a large-scale model of the process of going through the selection, going to the gas chambers, because we don't have any photos of the actual gassing, of course. Christina Chavarria: The diary, the quote, and the armband, take a look at that. The diary is the first diary that was donated to us by an American in captivity. Most of the diaries that we see they were written when they were in hiding or before they had to leave, but he was able to keep his diary while he was in the camp. It's also striking because Anthony Acevedo—he's not Jewish, in fact he's the son of Mexican immigrants. He is—we consider him to be a survivor, because of the fact that he went through a sub-camp of Buchenwald. Christina Chavarria: This is one of over a thousand citizenship papers that was found in somebody's attic in Switzerland. In a suitcase were these documents, these citizenship papers, issued by El Salvador that stated that the individuals who were named in the documents, whose pictures appeared on the documents were citizens of El Salvador, when in reality they were not—most of them were Hungarian Jews. This is 1944, Hungary is invaded in the spring of 1944 by Germany, and out of about 500,000 Hungarian Jews, over 430,000 died at Auschwitz in a very short period of time.

Race and Ethnicity in Advertising bnunez Wed, 01/16/2019 - 16:05
Annotation

Offering a new way of looking at the history of American culture and society, Race and Ethnicity in Advertising is a database of advertisements from across the United States throughout the 20th century.  This site offers a fresh lense for students to explore the changes in how Americans view themselves and each other in the world through the familiar medium of commercials and advertisements. 

Visitors to the site can explore the posters, videos, and images in three different ways.  With over 100 hundred pages of materials, every page offers diverse ads to analyze from the late 19th century through the early 21st century.  The option to browse by collection focuses on specific topics for analysis, such as Asian American representation and celebrity endorsement advertisements.  Browsing by essay is a function that highlights themes such as gender, stereotypes, and cultural transformation using adverts from different periods to demonstrate continuing trends.

The site is friendly to students of all ages with the background and contextual information provided for every advertisement.  Each item offers key information for students to place the ad within its historical context by providing the title, date, racial/ ethnic markers, and primary time period.  The Keywords and Context section also provides clarifying information that would assist students while evaluating sources or be a great way to introduce a new topic in the classroom.  

Advertising
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race
advertisements
advertising
Audio
Images
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Emergence of Modern US, 1890-1930
Great Depression & WWII, 1929-1945
Postwar US, 1945-Early 1970s
Contemporary US, 1968-Present

ABMC Education

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The American Battle Monuments Commission (ABMC) has updated its site to include interdisciplinary classroom activities that highlight a diverse set of topics relating to both World War I and World War II. ABMC manages permanent U.S. military cemeteries, memorials, and monuments within the United States and abroad. The lesson plans are geared for grades 6-12 and offer different levels of challenge, adaptations, and methods for extension.

“Horace Pippin: The Artist of No Man’s Land” introduces students to the experience of an African American soldier in World War I and how he used writing and painting to explain what he saw. “Tweeting the Air War Against the Nazis” employs technology to help students understand the role the Allied Air Forces played in the Normandy invasion.

Additionally, the user can search for lessons by grade level and subject: grades 6-8 or 9-12, Art, Art History, ELL, Journalism, Language Arts, Mathematics, Science, Social Studies, and Special Education. The lesson plans provide teachers with detailed teacher tips including links to interactive maps, primary sources, timelines, and videos.

One of the new features is “Teacher Voice” pieces on some activities. These provide a teacher’s feedback on their experience with teaching the activity in their classroom and include suggestions for adapting the activity according to time restraints or specific classroom needs. There is also a backpack feature that allows the user to bookmark items.

Fallen Hero profiles detail the experiences of individual service members during World War II. Teachers and students can view eulogy videos and primary sources on each individual’s profile page. Teachers can use collections of primary sources provided onsite to help their students visualize the war and the lives of their servicemen.

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Cemetery
Images
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For Us the Living

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For Us the Living is a resource for teachers that engages high school students through online primary-source based learning modules. Produced for the National Cemetery Administration's Veterans Legacy Program, this site tells stories of men and women buried in Alexandria National Cemetery, and helps students connect these stories to larger themes in American history. Primary sources used include photographs, maps, legislation, diaries, letters, and video interviews with scholars.

The site offers five modules for teachers to choose from, the first of which serves as an introduction to the cemetery's history. The other four cover topics such as: African American soldiers and a Civil War era protest for equal rights, the manhunt for John Wilkes Booth after Lincoln’s assassination, commemoration of Confederates during Reconstruction, and recognition of women for their military service. Most of the modules focus on the cemetery’s early history (founded in 1862) although two modules reach into the post-war era. Each module is presented as a mystery to solve, a question to answer, or a puzzle to unravel. Students must use historical and critical thinking skills to  uncover each story. Each module ends with two optional digital activities, a historical inquiry assignment and a service-learning project, related to the module theme.

Teachers should first visit the “Teach” section which allows them to preview each module (including its primary sources, questions and activities), learn how to get started, and see how the site’s modules connect with curriculum standards. In order to access the modules for classroom use, teachers do have to create their own account, but the sign up process is fast, easy, and best of all, free! The account allows teachers to set up multiple classes, choose specific module(s) for each class, assign due dates, and view student submissions.

Cartoons
Film and Video
Maps
Newspapers and Periodicals
Official Documents
Personal Accounts
Photographs
Political Documents
Speeches
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Confederate
Reconstruction
Cemetery
national cemetery
Abraham Lincoln; John Wilkes Booth; assassination
women
history of women
laundry
U.S. Colored Troops
Alexandria
Alexandria National Cemetery
petitions
African American
soldiers
Hospital
Memorial
military
9-12 Resources
Images
Text
Video
Veterans Day
Civil War & Reconstruction, 1850-1877
Devel. of the Industrial US, 1870-1900
Postwar US, 1945-Early 1970s
African Americans
Environment
Gender
Health & Medicine
Ideas & Ideologies
Legal History
Media
Mid-Atlantic
Military History
Politics
Reform
Slavery
Women

Open Parks Network

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Drawing of prisoners of war, Andersonville, Georgia.
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In conjunction with the National Park Service, Clemson University has digitized over 350,000 cultural heritage objects and 1.5 million pages of unpublished sources housed in over 20 national parks and historic sites. All images are high-resolution and downloadable.

Each park’s page contains a number of source collections, generally grouped by topic or time period. Open Parks Network allows users to find sources in a number of ways. Users may search by park, source collection, or keyword. For instance, the user can choose to see all collections and items from Andersonville National Historic Site by clicking on the park’s name.

Alternatively, users can navigate directly to a collection of Outer Banks Shipwrecks by browsing an overview of each park’s collections. Open Parks Network also features a map illustrating the number of sources from each geographical location that users can use to access sources. Each of these options are conveniently located in a single “Explore” tab.

The classroom utility of Open Parks Network’s sources varies widely. While the sources within some collections could be beneficial for classroom source analysis and research (e.g., the collection of Civil War Newspaper Illustrations on the Fort Sumter National Monument page), other collections would be of greater use to those with a specialized interest in a park’s operational history (e.g., the collection of Kings Mountain National Military Park Personnel). None of the sources come with any descriptive text, which can make it difficult to contextualize sources.

Instructors and students may find Open Parks Network useful for a variety of classroom activities, including using sources to encourage historical thinking about the past that the parks memorialize or about the parks themselves. This site might be of particular interest for teaching about the National Park Service, given its centennial anniversary in 2016.

Artifacts and Objects
Maps
Official Documents
Photographs
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historic sites
national parks
Images
General
Education
Environment
Mid-Atlantic
Military History
Popular Culture, Leisure
Southern States
Western States

myHistro

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Screencapture, Olympic Games, Jala Peno, myHistro, 2013
What is it?

myHistro is a storytelling tool that allows you to place events both geographically and on a timeline to tell a story. Users create stories that can have multiple events each of which takes place in a different time and place. The tool allows you to incorporate video, images, and text to narrate the story for users as they click through.

Getting Started

To start using myHistro, click the "Sign Up" button on the homepage. Provide your name and email address and you are ready to start creating a story.

To begin creating, select "Create a New Story." Type a name, a short description, and select a thumbnail image for your story. There is also the option to list several authors for the story—useful for students who are working as a group. Clicking on the "Tags, privacy, comments" hyperlink takes you to options that allow you to tag the story with relevant keywords, control who can see the story, and control who can comment once the story is finished.

Once you've created a story you'll want to create a few (or more) events to fill the story. Clicking the green "Next" button or the grey "Add and Manage Events" bar takes you to the event creation page. Here you can create as many events as you'd like to include in your story. Clicking "Create New Event" allows you to add a new event. You can set the start and end date (optional) for the event as well as add a time. If the event doesn't have a specific day or month associated with it, you can set them as unknown and just use the year. You can also set the date manually so that it can include a prehistoric date (BC) by selecting "Set Manually" at the bottom of the drop-down list under year.

You'll also want to set a location associated with an event. The map allows you to select from several map types including Satellite, Hybrid, Terrain, and the normal Google Maps view. You can plot the location of the event using the traditional map marker or you can use the drawing tools to draw a shape or a line on the map.

Once you've added your events, finalize your story by selecting "Save story." You'll then be taken to view your story. From here you can export, embed, or comment on your story. For a more detailed orientation to the options available within myHistro, see their Slideshare entitled "History Visualization: Basic Guidelines for History Teachers.”

Examples

myHistro could be used as either a teaching and presentational tool or as a project for students. The combination of creating a timeline and narrative and placing those within a geographical location require students to practice arranging and interpreting events in both time and space. The tool is probably best used with students of middle school age or older because of the complexity of creating stories and events.

Creating a story could help students review a unit or review for an exam, either in a group or individually. In this AP United States history project, each student from the class contributed in order to create a story of important events in U.S. history from 1619 to 1919. Each student is listed as an author and contributed an event to the story.

myHistro would also be useful as a pre- or post-lesson resource for students or as a visual during a lesson or lecture. This American Revolution story tracks the history of discontent in the colonies and the lead-up to the American Revolution from 1689 to 1789. Each event has an explanation of its significance and several images. Another excellent example is this history of the United States, 1918-1939, which chronicles major events during this time.

For more information

Geography and history are intimately linked. Check out more tools for using maps to help make sense of history in Tech for Teachers, including WhatWasThere, Google Maps, Google Earth, and Social Explorer.

Not certain how to use maps in the classroom? Watch award-winning teacher Stacy Hoeflich introduce her students to John Smith's map of Virginia.

Prohibition: A Film by Ken Burns & Lynn Novick

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Screencapture, Prohibition homepage
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This website provides a light introduction to the history of Prohibition in the United States, reinforced with videos and images from the Ken Burns and Lynn Novick documentary from PBS. The website showcases a photo gallery and biographies on figures from the time period paired with clips from the full-length documentary. The website also includes a map and timeline function for visualizing Prohibition efforts across space and time, as well as more than 10 lesson plans and activity resources for educators.

The website is relatively easy to navigate. The photo gallery contains more than 70 images of individuals, newspaper articles, and events, coupled with brief descriptions. More than 30 brief videos, pulled from the larger documentary, are scattered throughout the website. (Note: the video content is not transcribed or captioned.) Another useful feature may be the map, which enables visitors to get a sense of the geographical relationship of events and figures, or the timeline, which visualizes the sequence of events. Students may also be encouraged to examine one of the more than 20 biographies: brief descriptions paired with videos that provide a more in-depth discussion of the individual.

Educators should direct their attention to the For Educators section. This page provides access to four prepared lesson plans and nine quick "snapshot activities" intended to work in conjunction with website and documentary materials. These activities can be modified and integrated into larger units in coursework on these subjects. Given the graphic nature of some photos on the site and the available subject content, teachers may want to reserve the website for students grades eight and higher.

Film and Video
Photographs
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alcohol
documentaries
Eighteenth Amendment
Ken Burns
Lynn Novick
Prohibition
Images
Video
Emergence of Modern US, 1890-1930
Great Depression & WWII, 1929-1945
Business
Consumer Culture
Health & Medicine
Politics
Popular Culture, Leisure
Reform

What is Historical Thinking?

Date Published
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Historical Thinking poster, secondary side
Historical Thinking poster, secondary side
Article Body

We here at Teachinghistory.org use the term a lot and you have probably heard it bandied about lately. But what does it mean? Why is it important to teaching history in the 21st century? And most importantly, what does teaching and learning historical thinking look like in the classroom?

In this first of a series of blogs about historical thinking, we identify resources that introduce and frame this complex set of processes. We also identify features here at Teachinghistory.org that you can explore to see what historical thinking looks like in real classroom lessons and materials.

Instructional Frameworks

We recommend starting with our seven-minute "What is Historical Thinking?" video available on our home page. In it we define historical thinking as the reading, analysis, and writing that is necessary to develop our understanding of the past.

The past is difficult to retrieve and [historical thinking] helps us write accurate stories about what happened and what those events meant.

The past is difficult to retrieve and these ways of reading and analysis help us write accurate stories about what happened and what those events meant. In the video we use the question, "How do we know what we know?" to frame historical thinking.

Five core components of historical thinking help us answer that question. These are:

  1. Multiple Accounts & Perspectives
  2. Analysis of Primary Documents
  3. Sourcing
  4. Understanding Historical Context
  5. Claim-Evidence Connection

Frameworks like this one can help you and your students make sense of complex thinking processes. Use it to plan instruction and consider the kinds of tasks that students tackle in your classroom. Introduce it to your students and refer back to it as you teach lessons that incorporate these components.

Browse digital resources that offer related frameworks that can be used in the same way. This movie at Historical Thinking Matters introduces the nature of historical reading and includes a rationale for the civic importance of building your students' historical reading skills. Based on empirical research done by Stanford Professor Sam Wineburg, the video introduces and models four historical reading and thinking strategies: sourcing, contextualization, corroboration, and close reading. Continue exploring Historical Thinking Matters and the Stanford History Education Group website to find instructional resources for using this framework in middle and high school classrooms.

Investigate any of these frameworks to learn more about the nature of "historical thinking."

Check out this entry about the Historical Inquiry: Scaffolding Wise Practices in the History Classroom project produced by scholars at Virginia Tech. Explore video tutorials and text that demonstrate historical reading and thinking using their SCIM-C (summarizing, contextualizing, inferring, monitoring, corroborating) framework. While you’re there, browse their list of links to find related teaching materials.

Visit the Benchmarks of Historical Thinking produced by the Canadian Centre for Historical Consciousness for another helpful framework. Focused on six core concepts including historical significance and the ethical dimensions of history, this site includes lesson plans that show each concept in action.

Don’t forget the Historical Thinking Standards produced by UCLA’s National Center for History in the Schools. Chunked into five sets of skills, including chronological thinking and historical research capabilities, these standards identify composite skills that can help you conceptualize historical thinking in concrete and practical ways.

Investigate any of these frameworks to learn more about the nature of "historical thinking.” Consider using one of them to help you make choices about how you will scaffold and segment instruction and to help your students name and understand the thinking skills they will learn in your class.

What Does Teaching Historical Thinking Look Like in the Classroom?

Visit features here at Teachinghistory.org to see real-world examples of teaching for historical thinking. Browse Teaching in Action to see teachers and students engaged in classroom lessons that integrate historical thinking. Watch fourth-grade students closely analyze John Smith's 1612 map or secondary students use evidence from primary sources to discuss the Black Codes in the post Civil War South.

It is our mission to bring you quality resources for integrating this vital, engaging, and necessary aspect of understanding history into your classroom.

Explore Examples of Historical Thinking to see short videos of historians and students actively analyzing historical sources. Browse these to strengthen your understanding of these thinking processes and use them to model the same for your students.

Explore Lesson Plan Reviews to find K–12 lesson plans that have earned our gold seal of approval—each includes an aspect of teaching for historical thinking. Check out the rubric we use to evaluate these plans and notice the lesson descriptors that directly relate to historical thinking:

  • Requires students to read and write
  • Requires close reading and attention to source information
  • Requires students to analyze or construct interpretations using evidence

Teaching Guides detail specific instructional approaches for building your students' historical thinking capabilities. Try this one about closely analyzing images with elementary students, this one about creating service projects with local history museums, or this one about coaching secondary students in writing thesis statements.

Don't miss our Teaching with Textbooks feature to find methods for challenging the textbook's privileged place as the final word in the classroom and helping students see it as one account among many.

There are many more resources at Teachinghistory.org for exploring the nature of historical thinking and how to teach for it. Because, yes, it is our mission to bring you quality resources for integrating this vital, engaging, and necessary aspect of understanding history into your classroom. So explore!

For more information

Click on the "History is an Argument About the Past" image above to request a free Historical Thinking poster!

Watch the five steps of historical thinking at work in "What is Historical Thinking?," an introductory video, and explore resources on each of the steps using the accompanying links.

Copyright: Finding Images to Tell the Story of History

Date Published
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Here it is! Jackrabbit Trading Post, Route 66, AZ, Carol M. Highsmith, LoC
Here it is! Jackrabbit Trading Post, Route 66, AZ, Carol M. Highsmith, LoC
Here it is! Jackrabbit Trading Post, Route 66, AZ, Carol M. Highsmith, LoC
Here it is! Jackrabbit Trading Post, Route 66, AZ, Carol M. Highsmith, LoC
Here it is! Jackrabbit Trading Post, Route 66, AZ, Carol M. Highsmith, LoC
Article Body

As you browse the Internet for sources, searching for photographs of this event or that monument, do you ever get frustrated by the ins and outs of copyright law? In most situations, it won't be an issue—images you choose to use won't go beyond your classroom and it's unlikely your students will question your adherence to the rules of fair use.

But what if you or your students are working on something that will travel beyond your classroom? Maybe your students are creating short digital documentaries, and you want to host the finished projects on a website—or even upload them to YouTube? Maybe you want students to create small websites themselves, or produce other types of presentations that will be shared with the public online?

Now you're talking distribution, and stakes go up a little. Before you get deep into the project, you may want to take the time to orient your students to copyright and public domain. Even if you doubt your students' work will draw a large audience or generate any rights challenges, consider this a teachable moment. In a world of easy downloading, it's possible your students have never thought about the complicated web of laws that surrounds every image they encounter every day.

A First Look at Copyright Law

A good place to start is Tales from the Public Domain: BOUND BY LAW?, a comic book created by Keith Aoki, James Boyle, and Jennifer Jenkins for the Duke Center for the Study of the Public Domain. In this good-natured tour of copyright law, the main character, Akiko, just wants to make a documentary about a day in the life of New York City. What challenges will she face, and does she have the right to use the images she captures? Remember that this comic came out in 2006, and copyright laws are constantly changing!

After this orientation to thinking about copyright, ask your students to consider places they might find images. Take a look around some of the major online public archives, like the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Collection or the National Archives and Research Administration's ARC.

Photo, Washington Monument on armistice night, 1921, Nov. 25, 1921, Library of CongressHave students search for topics both historical and contemporary, and see what the entries for the images they turn up say about copyright. "No known restrictions on publication?" "Unrestricted?" Images created before 1923 should be in the public domain, free of copyright restrictions, as should images created by government organizations. More recent sources may note copyright restrictions, including specific caveats about how a source may be reproduced.

More Stops on a Copyright Tour

Compare the copyright notices on the Library of Congress and NARA's sites to those on sites that make copyright restriction on their images clear, such as the National Geographic Photo Collection or Getty Images. Are these sites archives in the same way the Library of Congress and NARA's collections are? What information do they provide about their images? What seems to be their purpose in providing the images?

Photo, Alamo IMG_0676, Jan. 20, 2006, OZinOH, FlickrAnother informative stop might be Yahoo's Flickr. Type any word in the search box and you'll come up with thousands of images taken by photographers worldwide, from amateurs to professionals. Looking for a modern-day image of a historic site to contrast with a historical image? A picture of a monument or memorial, a museum or a work of art? Chances are, you'll find it here. But the social nature of the site doesn't mean copyright doesn't apply to these images! Check out the license information in the right-hand column. Are all rights reserved? Or does the photo have a Creative Commons license? (Flickr's Advanced Search lets you search just for Creative Commons-licensed images.)

Contributing to History

After all of this, are you or your students still having a difficult time finding a usable image of something or somewhere? Maybe you need a picture of the casters on the back of the main statue on the FDR Memorial in Washington, DC, or a photo of the interior of the Old Stone House at the Manassas National Battlefield Park. Many people have worked to fill in gaps in the documentation of our history and the world around us, today and in the past. For instance, during the New Deal, photographers for the Farm Security Administration and Office of War Information took thousands of photographs of people and places all across the U.S.—government creations that were (and still are) largely in the public domain. Today, individuals like photographer Carol Highsmith donate their photographs to the public domain. Inspired by Frances Benjamin Johnston, an early female photographer who gave many of her photographs to the Library of Congress, Highwater plans to spend more than a decade travelling the U.S., taking photographs that she will give to the Library of Congress as public-domain donations.

Here it is! Jackrabbit Trading Post, Route 66, Joseph City, Arizona, Jul. 4, 2006, Carol M. Highsmith, Library of CongressNow that your students understand how tricky it may be to find sources that can be freely used to tell the story of history, they're in a position to help out, themselves! What historic sites or other traces of history exist in your local area? Are there Creative Commons-licensed images of these on, say, Flickr? If not, how about collecting some? Students can help fill in the gaps in our public record of place and time, and add to the resources available to students like themselves.

For more information

For more on copyright, check out Teachinghistory.org director Kelly Schrum's answer to an Ask a Digital Historian question on fair use.

Plan Ahead for Professional Development in Spring 2013

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Photo, SSC Sample Spread 1, bjornmeansbear, Jul 2, 2009, bjornmeansbear, Flickr
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Ready for spring? How about summer? It's never too early to start planning ahead for professional development. Historical societies, museums, libraries, and other institutions across the nation offer workshops, seminars, conferences, and more for U.S. history educators. Visit the websites of your local and state institutions to see what they're planning, and check out these offerings from national institutions:

  • American Bar Association and Federal Judicial Center:
    Offer a week-long institute on federal trials and great debates in U.S. history. Applications are due by Mar. 1, 2013.
  • Bill of Rights Institute:
    Offers a week-long Founders Fellowship for high school teachers, Jul. 22-26. Fellows explore the intersection of civil and economic liberty in lectures, discussions, and site visits in Washington, DC. Fellows receive a $400 travel stipend, as well as $100 upon completion of post-program activities. Applications are due by Mar. 26, 2013.
  • Civil War Trust:
    Offers two-day regional institutes and one four-day national institute. Institutes require a refundable registration deposit. Registration begins February 2013 for the national institute.
  • C-SPAN Classroom:
    Offers a four-week fellowship for middle and high school teachers. Participants will develop teaching materials using C-SPAN's resources. Fellows receive a $7,000 award. Registration ends Feb. 8, 2013.
  • Dirksen Congressional Center:
    Offers a week-long workshop on teaching about Congress for middle and high school teachers. Requires a nonrefundable $135 registration fee.
  • Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History:
    Offers week-long seminars for full-time K–12 teachers. Seminars take place at locations across the U.S. and treat topics from the era of George Washington to 9/11. Requires a nonrefundable $25 registration fee; participants can also register to receive graduate credit. Applications are due by Feb. 15, 2013.
  • Library of Congress:
    Offers summer teacher institutes. Applications are due Feb. 4, 2013.
  • National Archives and Records Administration:
    Offers "Primarily Teaching" workshops for upper elementary- through college-level educators. Workshops introduce teachers to the holdings of the Archives and techniques for using them with students. Requires $100 nonrefundable fee, with graduate credit available for an additional fee.
  • National Endowment for the Humanities:
    Offers two- to five-week seminars and three- to five-week institutes for K–12 educators as well as week-long workshops on landmarks of U.S. history and culture (see the full listing). Seminars, institutes, and workshops cover a wide range of topics and emphasize introducing participants to the scholarly process. Provides stipends from $1,200 to $4,500. Applications are due by Mar. 4, 2013.
  • Smithsonian American Art Museum:
    Offers the Clarice Smith National Teacher Institutes, week-long institutes for 6–12 teachers featuring strategies for connecting art, language arts, and social studies. Requires $200 nonrefundable fee, with graduate credit available for an additional fee; $500 scholarships available. Applications are due by Apr. 1, 2013.
  • Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture:
    Together with the Smithsonian American Art Museum, offers a free online conference, "Oh Freedom!," on teaching African American civil rights history with art. The conference will take place on Feb. 6, 2013; register on the website to participate.
For more information

What makes professional development useful? Educators and professional development directors share their thoughts in this Roundtable.

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