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 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.

Have 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.

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?

Another 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.)

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.

Now 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.

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.

A funny—or not so funny—thing happened on the way to making what was conceived as a historically complex version of the Alamo's story: 9/11. Though the Walt Disney Company had agreed to make The Alamo at least two years before the World Trade Center fell, the film was reconceived in the year after that event. By the summer of 2002, The Alamo had lost its director (Ron Howard) and its star (Russell Crowe), and the screenplay by John Sayles was undergoing a major rewrite. Howard was replaced by John Lee Hancock, Crowe was replaced by Dennis Quaid, and Sayles's screenplay was rewritten by a team of script doctors. The 2004 release of The Alamo culminated what had been a long and public struggle to make this film.

Howard's expressed interest was based on his desire to correct the historical inaccuracies found in the John Wayne-directed The Alamo (1960), a creature of the Cold War and Wayne's rightist politics. In addition, Howard was intrigued by the complexities of ethnic conflict and the issues of U.S. expansion that the Alamo story presented. Said Howard upon leaving the project, “I realized that there was a disconnect between the studio and I as to how the film should be approached.” The completed version of the film retains vestiges of Howard's vision, but they are largely submerged within a film that was built by committee in a post-9/11 United States.

The battle of the Alamo as a historical event, like Custer's Last Stand, the attack on Pearl Harbor, and now 9/11, stands as one of the galvanizing events in the narrative of U.S. history, providing a tale of tragic commitment to the cause of U.S. nationalism. Ideally, the story would lead to the redemptive annihilation of those who had killed these tragic heroes. Richard Slotkin's broad concept of “regeneration through violence” and his more focused discussion of the cultural significance of Custer's Last Stand in his study The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800–1890 (1985) help us see the cultural work that this film attempts to do and the way it fuses residual myth and contemporary events. For such myths to perform their cultural work, we must see those who died in the events as martyrs for the greater national cause. Apparently Howard was at least going to mitigate that mythology. The film as released embraces it, though in a somewhat diffuse way.

The Alamo begins with ground-level shots of the courtyard of the Alamo mission and the plains outside the walls that show the carnage of the siege of the mission, providing an image that triggers memories of the events of September 2001. The film then jump-cuts to a title informing us that we are now in Washington, DC, one year earlier, in 1835. We see Sam Houston (Dennis Quaid) at a ball attempting to interest investors in Texas lands and Davy Crockett (Billy Bob Thornton) somewhat sheepishly attending a play that embellishes his life and legend. In these scenes we can see the intention of Howard and his crew to demystify the legends of Houston and Crockett. Houston is primarily an entrepreneur, and one with a drinking problem, and Crockett a creature intrigued by the contours of his own legend. But in the film as made, we subsequently see how circumstances have remade these worldly men into heroes (though Thornton's Crockett is somewhat abashed by the dimensions of his own fame, a perspective that makes this Crockett a far more humble and complex figure than he was in the Disney television series of the 1950s or in the Wayne film).

As history, The Alamo looks accurate, and, indeed, we find that San Antonio de Béxar was carefully re-created with little sparing of expense (the film cost $95 million to make) and with the able assistance of the Alamo historian and curator, Richard Bruce Winders, and Stephen L. Hardin, a historian at Victoria College in Victoria, TX. But what is missing is similar to what is absent from the Wayne movie: a sense of the way the events at the Alamo are connected to the national story of slavery, expansion, and the removal of Native Americans from the eastern United States in the 1830s and 1840s. If we include this larger tale, we can perhaps get a feel for the broader perspective that initially generated interest in the project.

Andrew Jackson's policy of removing indigenous peoples from east of the Mississippi River to the West relied on the United States' domain over those western lands. Although Texas was not a part of the land that Jackson had dedicated to the tribes displaced from the East, it did abut them. Further, Texas had become a more and more tempting piece of western land after Mexico became independent of Spain in 1821. Mexico lacked economic resources, a strong central government, and a clear sense of national identity. The relative weakness of the nation to the south made annexation of its lands quite attractive. That the Mexican government had encouraged Anglo settlement further tempted entrepreneurs and manifest destinarians alike.

Texas also rose to the center of the national consciousness as a result of its relation to the line of demarcation that defined slave and free states in the Missouri Compromise of 1820. As a state south of the southern border of Missouri, its entry into the Union would make it a slave state, and, indeed, its various settlers had mostly come from the South, some bringing slaves. The issue of slavery would remain a matter of debate both in defining the region as part of the United States and in exacerbating the conflict with Mexico over domain. And while the film does introduce the question of where the loyalties of its two characters who are enslaved should lie—with the antislavery Mexicans or the proslavery Anglos—the broader issue of slavery in Texas is largely elided.

Similarly, there is a Hispanic character, Juan Seguin (Jordi Mollà), who has a secondary role in the film and whose status as a Mexican who supports the Anglos is clearly significant. But there is little fleshing out of the character or his reasons, elements that might have added historical complexity to the narrative. Historically, Seguin was a civic leader in the Béxar region who supported the independence movement in 1835 and 1836 and led a militia of around a hundred men. This placed him among a minority of Mexicans who supported the independence movement because of their opposition to federalism and support of local rule. However, by 1837 almost no non-Anglos remained loyal to the Republic of Texas, as the racist practices of its leaders and partisans had reduced all Mexicans to a subordinate political and social status.

The film ends with the redemptive Battle of San Jacinto, as the Anglo forces are led to victory by Sam Houston, thus closing our narrative. The final scene cuts from the mass killing fields of San Jacinto, featuring dead Mexican soldiers as far as the eye can see, to the iconic figure of Davy Crockett fiddling on the wall of the Alamo. The carnage at San Jacinto redresses the slaughter at the Alamo and is all the more significant for its delivering Texas from the clutches of the tyrannical Mexican general Antonio López de Santa Anna. The vanquishing of the barbaric and morally suspect—evil—Mexican leader brings into being the Texas republic. In contemporary terms, such a conclusion is oddly resonant as national leaders attempt to show how delivering Iraq from the clutches of the tyrannical Saddam Hussein—and the imposition of “democracy” in that nation—will avenge the attacks of 9/11. On March 2, 2005, Republican congressman Ted Poe from the district that includes the Alamo spelled out the connection:

On this day, 169 years ago, Texas declared its independence from Mexico and its dictator, Santa Anna, the 19th-century Saddam Hussein. . . Freedom has a cost. It always does. It always will. And as we pause to remember those who lost their lives so that Texas could be a free Nation, we cannot forget those Americans that are currently fighting in lands across the seas for the United States’ continued freedom and liberty today.