Teachers today face a great challenge in keeping students' attention in a media-saturated world in which these students are immersed in fast-moving imagery, multitasking, and instant gratification. As history educators increasingly view the traditional textbook as a limited instruction tool, many are exploring methods of teaching that develop essential historical research and analysis skills while also making history interesting and fun.

The Louisiana State Museum actively encourages educators to use our exhibits and collections for studying material culture, as we embrace a mission where the museum provides a hands-on extension of the classroom. The museum's collection, which focuses on the history and culture of Louisiana, provides a diverse array of objects for studying history from the past 4,000 years.

From pre-contact Native American artifacts to those recovered from Hurricane Katrina, the museum's collection offers a window into the past and also a mirror of the present for the 30,000 students who visit the museum system annually. And because many educators are not able to visit the museum in person, we also provide access to significant artifacts and images through our website.

As educators strive to move beyond the textbook to stimulate and engage students, the prospect of studying material culture appears attractive to teachers for several reasons. First, the process of studying material culture engages students to think and ask questions, not just passively accept the teacher's view of history. As the students examine the artifacts, they become historians themselves in terms of learning to ask the appropriate questions about historical context, and by comparing and contrasting relevant historical periods. This process of learning to ask questions develops greater thinking and analytical skills.

Second, this process of studying material culture encourages greater intellectual independence among students. By asking students to work in teams, and analyze an historical object from the perspective of studying material culture, they can formulate their own questions and reach their own conclusions about the significance of an object and its historical relevance. The focus on an object, or group of artifacts, allows the student to take ownership of history, and not rely on the teacher to provide the answers. This fostering of independence can provide students with a sense of accomplishment and self-reliance that cannot be achieved through simple lecture and testing format.

Third, studying material culture is a great tool for bringing history to life and making it relevant to students' lives. Many students do not relate to history, because they find it irrelevant to their own interest or concerns. But by studying historical artifacts, the possibilities are greater for students making a personal and meaningful connection.

For example, in our Cabildo Museum in the French Quarter, the Battle of New Orleans exhibit features a field drum used by Jordan Noble, who was an enslaved teenage musician in 1815. The history of Jordan Noble provides a window into the role of both enslaved and free persons in defending New Orleans from the British invasion of 1814–1815.

However, students from the New Orleans area relate to the music connection in the story. In a society where parades and music processions are part of the cultural fabric, the Noble drum provides a relevant touchstone or hook that then allows them to learn the personal history of an individual within the context of the larger event. While the drum is a fun and engaging artifact for this region, educators should always try to find artifacts of material culture that will engage students in their relevant cultural context.

No set method to study material culture exists, and this lack of set pedagogy can be daunting to any teacher who wants to incorporate the process into their curriculum. But at the same time, the method is wide open to adaptation by teachers to make it relevant to their students.

Teachers interested in adapting material-culture-based ideas into their lessons are encouraged to seek museums and websites that promote this method, and also to network with other teachers who have used it in the past, and who may have valuable ideas on the most effective methods for different subjects or grade levels.

History kits (“trunks,” “boxes,” etc.), available for rent or purchase, have attracted attention from school districts, museums, and funders as a tool for integrating material culture into history instruction, and rightly so. As a museum educator and historian, I often witness the power of “stuff” (aka material culture) to connect students of all ages to historical events and people that might otherwise seem both remote and irrelevant. (1)

As an educator once cautioned me, however, “The world is full of dead kits.” You may have come across some yourself—boxes full of objects and notebooks stuffed with resources and lesson plans—developed with the best intentions and often at some expense, yet languishing on museum shelves or in curriculum directors’ offices. No matter how attractively packaged and thoughtfully conceived, using neat stuff in a history classroom is no slam-dunk.

Ultimately, efforts to enliven and deepen history instruction come down, as in so much else, to the teacher. This means that districts need to devote time and resources to professionally developing K–12 educators in the effective use of material culture in the history classroom. Even high school teachers confident in their ability to use primary source documents with students typically lack training in teaching with material culture. Without such training, even the most inspiring history kits are likely to stay on the shelf.

The Deerfield Teachers’ Center (DTC) has found that combining teacher training in material culture with access to well-designed history kits is an effective strategy for improving history instruction. Best of all, it is a replicable model. Museums with robust education programs welcome opportunities to work with schools and teachers to develop strategies and materials to bring material culture into the classroom.

The Deerfield Teachers’ Center has created nine Traveling History kits to meet the needs of teachers and students. Designed around historical events, topics, and themes ranging from early exploration and contact to World War II, kits contain reproduction objects, images, music, and documents as well as contextual information and teacher background materials. Each item is carefully selected for inclusion based on its capacity to convey essential content and to promote skills of historical thinking and critical analysis in elementary and high school students. So far, so good. But how to encourage teachers to use these rich resources in their classrooms?

This is where teacher training in material culture comes in. Educators who attend DTC professional development interact with material culture in workshops and seminars. Teaching American History (TAH) project participants also select and observe a History Lab in their own classroom. In-class History Labs taught by DTC staff are organized around specific topics and themes and model teaching with a variety of primary sources, including material culture, to meet specific learning objectives. These experiences build teacher interest and confidence in using material culture; educators report that they routinely include such sources in their own teaching as a result of the training they received.

Embedding material culture in its historical context extends and deepens students’ knowledge beyond superficial memorization of dates and factoids. Hands-on, collaborative interaction with the “stuff” of history helps students to connect abstract concepts communicated through documents and secondary sources to human experience. Teachers and students take tea 18th-century style using reproduction tea equipage in the Tea Tax Tempest kit as they consider the role tea played in English social, economic, and political life on the eve of the American Revolution. (2)

The Made in America History Lab models for teachers how to use kit items to explore with students the role of a colony in the British Empire and offers students tangible evidence of the mercantilist assumptions that informed British economic policies. Access to this rich material culture also offers teachers alternatives to historically inaccurate activities involving appealingly tactile puffs of batting and sheep-to-wool textile stories that reinforce the myth of colonial self-sufficiency.

Not surprisingly, teachers who have observed a History Lab program are much more likely to use a history kit on their own. And, of course, kits are fun to use! Teacher training in material culture combined with access to well-designed history kits is a winning combination for any American history classroom. Is there a history kit on your shelf?

1 For a fascinating discussion of the potential power, utility, and methodology of using material culture to forward historical understandings, see Jules David Prown and Kenneth Haltman, eds., American Artifacts: Essays in Material Culture (East Lansing: University of Michigan State Press, 2000).

2 T.H. Breen, “Baubles of Britain,” Past & Present, 119 (May 1988): 73–104; Rodris Roth, "Tea Drinking in Eighteenth Century America: Its Etiquette and Equipage," in Material Life in America, 1600–1860, ed. Robert Blair St. George (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988), 439–463.

While the Holocaust bears the distinction of being the most documented genocide, it also bears the weight of incomprehension. Oftentimes, this leads to pedagogical approaches that, though well-intentioned, distort or trivialize history. To better understand the factors that led to the persecution and murder of European Jews and millions of non-Jews, how do intentional encounters with seemingly ordinary artifacts—in the exhibition space of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and through its online resources—promote historical thinking for understanding the Holocaust's profundity?

First, artifacts facilitate translating the statistical millions into individuals. (1) This in turn demonstrates how chronology, geography, and circumstance led to persecution, murder, or survival for the mosaic of victims. When used as a sustained classroom teaching tool, the identity cards visitors receive when entering the Permanent Exhibition illustrate these factors. (Over 500 are now available on the Museum's website.)

For example, the identity card of Gad Beck reveals that as a Mischlinge—the child of a German Gentile mother and Jewish father—Beck was spared deportation to the killing centers in Eastern Europe. While many homosexuals lived in fear, and thousands were persecuted and murdered, being part of the homosexual community aided Beck’s survival. He turned to trusted non-Jewish homosexual friends to provide food and hiding places.

Beck's card also calls for inquiry into the 1935 Nuremberg Race Laws. Under these laws, anyone who had three or four Jewish grandparents was considered to be Jewish, regardless of whether that individual identified himself or herself as a Jew or belonged to the Jewish religious community. The card details his betrayal by a Jewish spy for the Gestapo near the end of the war in 1945. The year bears examination, for if his betrayal had occurred prior to 1945, this would have severely limited his chance to survive.

Second, artifact contemplation helps to contextualize the Holocaust beyond the brutality of mass murder. On the Museum's third floor, visitors encounter a mass assortment of victims' shoes from the Majdanek killing center near Lublin, Poland. The shoes signify the systematic plunder of victims' belongings in the dehumanization process of the Holocaust. Students visiting the shoe exhibit notice the deterioration of the shoes, but they may also notice the variety of styles and realize that for many victims, the shoes may be the only personal items that survive them. The shoes remind students of the personal stories behind the artifact.

Next to the shoes, the Tower of Faces displays photographs of shtetl life in Eishyshok, now in Lithuania. These photos, available on the Museum's online archive, portray a vibrant Jewish community that existed for 900 years. In 1941, an SS mobile killing squad entered the village and in two days murdered the Jewish population. The photos speak not to the killing, but to the culture and inhabitants of Eastern European shtetl life before the war while ensuring that the victims not remain faceless or forgotten.

Third, analyzing artifacts of Holocaust history helps avoid giving simple answers to complex questions. The voyage of the St. Louis, displayed on the Museum's fourth floor and in an online exhibition, frames the often-asked question, "Why didn't they just leave?" as a conduit to understanding how U.S. immigration quotas established in the 1920s prevented significant Jewish immigration in the 1930s and 1940s.

Examining the photo album of a St. Louis passenger increases students' understanding of the individuals who were impacted by the "push-pull-push back" factors of emigration and immigration. The album's photos depict passengers dancing and dining, roller-skating and sunning themselves on the ship's deck, blissfully unaware that they will soon be denied entry to Cuba and the U.S. Realizing that their lives were in peril if they remained in Europe, their fates were determined by factors beyond their control. The photo album prompts students to look at the social, diplomatic, political, and often anti-Semitic tone in the U.S. before and during the war. The St. Louis photo album provokes scrutiny of U.S. foreign policy then and now, and perhaps more importantly, the photo album conveys that history is not inevitable but is shaped by decision-making at all levels.

Analysis of the Museum's rich trove of artifacts can move the Holocaust from the abstract to the tangible. As the witness generation passes away, Holocaust education will rely increasingly on evidence from the era. Through contemplation of artifacts and other documents, studying the Holocaust will remain dynamic well into the 21st century.

Note: The views expressed are the author's alone and do not necessarily represent those of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum or any other organization.

A 1978 Ford LTD. Coppertone SPF 2 suntan oil. A cassette tape of Chicago 17 playing on an oversized, yet portable stereo. These three items of material culture help tell the story of my coming of age years in the 1980s. With them (or with images of them) I can engage students in a historical narrative that might come across something like this in a textbook: "In the 1970s, American auto manufacturers continued building the same large, tank-like cars with poor fuel efficiency that they had been making since the 1950s. The dangers of skin cancer were still not widely known or heeded as sunbathers used suntan oil as a means of accelerating the tanning process rather than blocking it. Cassette tapes replaced eight-tracks and portable 'boom boxes' crept into youth culture."

In the now classic The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life, Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen argue that Americans place more trust in museums and what they say about the past than they do in history textbooks or even history teachers. (1) I see a clear link between their findings (Rosenzweig and Thelen interviewed over 1,000 Americans to come up with their thesis) and the value of using material culture in the U. S. history classroom.

Though good museums (and good teachers) have learning objectives in all that they do, the appeal of displaying artifacts, they argue, is the sense that the experience is unmediated and the viewer makes his or her own sense of the items, unlike a history textbook or classroom lecture where an authority tells one what is important. A picture of a funny-looking old car, a bottle of suntan oil, and a cassette tape are much more accessible and less intimidating to students as pieces of historical evidence than books and documents. But with these artifacts, I can still tell a story in which several themes of late 20th-century U. S. history come into focus—suburbanization, the ongoing struggle for desegregation in public schools, the 1970s oil crisis, the slow decline of the American auto industry, the advent of cancer awareness, and the last gasp of faceless music—that which came before MTV.

U.S. history teachers realize that students need to know more than just the names of important political figures or the dates when certain battles took place. The new social history of the 1960s, which continues to this day, means that we place value on the stories of all people, all perspectives. But to find out about all those different historical actors we must sometimes go beyond traditional primary sources.

Material culture can be an important piece of evidence to help students understand the lives of the not so rich and famous. As in my example, having students bring in a few items that help tell the story of their lives as an introductory activity can help broaden their idea of what a primary source is. To keep it from becoming just a trip “down memory lane,” insist that students choose their items as pieces of evidence that help answer a larger historical question, posed by you in the original assignment. The work of Daisy Martin and the Stanford History Education Group (SHEG) have greatly influenced my thinking in this regard.

While it is important to recognize that material culture, or artifacts, are a specialized kind of primary source and may require specialized analytical tools, basic questions such as who created this, who used it, when did they use it, and why did they use it fit well within the same “Reading Like a Historian” framework that SHEG developed for reading more traditional sources.

While my examples so far have focused on recent U. S. history, delving into 18th- and 19th-century U. S. history using material culture is also possible. Many museums have developed “traveling trunks” based on themes such as frontier life, Civil War soldiers, and immigration to Ellis Island, that teachers can request for free or just the cost of shipping. (2)

Resourceful teachers can assemble their own traveling trunks by gathering materials from antique stores, museum gift shops, yard sales, and attics. Giving students the opportunity to see and touch items of material culture provides a tactile, and even emotional, connection to the past that can be of great benefit to U.S. history teachers wishing to broaden students’ view of what history is and who played an important role in it.

1 Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen, The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 91.

2 See here for an example.