The Society operates a museum in an Old Methodist church building. The Museum displays both permanent and changing exhibits on local history.
The society offers educational programs, lectures, and occasional recreational and educational events; the museum offers exhibits.
The Society operates a museum complex, complete with research resources, special exhibits, and a museum gift shop. The Depot Museum is housed in the historic 1916 Northern Pacific Depot. The building is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The museum features a rotating schedule of exhibits regarding the heritage of Aitkin County. Riverboating on the upper Mississippi, native culture, and unique artifacts are explored and displayed in the exhibit halls. The Log Museum was the first home of the Society and was constructed in 1950 with native cedar logs. It was originally located on the court house lawn and moved to its present location in the mid-70s. Exhibits relate to the county's logging heritage, agricultural implements, and tools from the building trades.
The society offers occasional living history events, research library access, and educational and recreational events; the museums offer exhibits and tours.
The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) serves as a portal to the digital collections of more then 40 state, regional, and online-only libraries, museums, archives, and other cultural institutions. Created to strengthen access to public resources and to "create novel environments for learning, tools for discovery, and engaging apps," the DPLA is an invaluable first stop for teachers and students looking for primary sources, particularly regional history sources.
Visitors to the website can search the more than 4,500,000 objects in the collections of participating institutions using keywords, returning results they can filter by format, owning institution, partner, date, language, location, and subject. Clicking on an object brings up detailed metadata, including creator, date of creation, and a description of the object, as well as a link to its original location online. Visitors who create a free account can save their search results, make them private or public, and share them via Facebook, Twitter, or Google+.
Visitors can also browse objects on a map or timeline—a fantastic way to prompt thinking about how primary sources are located in time and space. The timeline stretches from 1000 BCE to the present. (Note that zooming into the map returns finer results.) In addition, more than eight virtual exhibits demonstrate how DPLA sources can be curated to tell stories about themes and events.
The DPLA's API (application programming interface) allows visitors with the know-how to create apps drawing on the DPLA's collections. An eclectic set of more than 10 apps lets visitors browse DPLA's search results as a "river of images," discover primary sources related to their Zotero bibliographies, and more.
A fantastic starting point for anyone looking for primary sources, teachers can feel confident pointing students towards the DPLA to begin research projects or turning to the DPLA themselves to find resources to support lesson plans.
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.
For more on copyright, check out Teachinghistory.org director Kelly Schrum's answer to an Ask a Digital Historian question on fair use.
This website explores the vaccination process from 900 CE to the present day. Tracing humanity's earliest known observations about disease transmission and immunity up to modern vaccination programs, the website includes articles, primary sources, and interactive activities.
Most attractive to educators will be the "Gallery" section. Browse more than 550 primary sources related to disease and vaccination, including pamphlets, photographs, artifacts, and more, as well as 90 videos. For easier browsing, filter the sources by topic, media type, or time period.
History teachers will also appreciate the "Activities" section. Seven interactive diagrams illustrate scientific and historical concepts, including herd immunity, how vaccinations work and how they are made, and changes in required vaccines over time. "Pioneer Breakthroughs," an interactive quiz, tests players' knowledge of vaccine-related discoveries, and "The Scientific Method" walks players through the steps in identifying the source of a disease outbreak and containing it. "Illsville," an online game, challenges players to keep the population of a town healthy from 1600 through the present day.
The site also includes an interactive timeline featuring images and short synopses of events from 900 CE to the present. View all of the events, or filter them by topic.
A database of essays in "Articles" covers more than 50 topics in the categories "Vaccine Science," "History and Society," "Vaccine Information," "Vaccine-preventable Diseases," and "Common Questions."
Note the four lesson plans in the "Educators" section. Spanish-language versions of site content are available as well.
In partnership with the National Center for Family Literacy, the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History shares its work in linking literature, history, and hands-on learning on this site. A spin-off of programs presented in the museum, OurStory highlights 18 notable children's fiction and nonfiction books, including Ken Mochizuki's Baseball Saved Us, Doreen Rappaport's Martin's Big Words, and Peter and Connie Roop's Keep the Lights Burning, Annie.
The site summarizes each book and offers parents and teachers a downloadable reading guide, including vocabulary; pre-, during, and post-reading activities; descriptions and images of Smithsonian artifacts related to the text or illustrations; and related NCHS History Standards. Downloadable activity guides, outlining activities such as making a Jailed for Freedom suffragist's pin or roleplaying contemporary debate on the March on Washington, also accompany each book summary.
Visitors may browse the featured books by time period, and the activity guides by activity type. In addition, visitors may search a database of 290 fiction and nonfiction books for young people by title, author, topic, age group, book type (fiction or nonfiction), and awards (Caldecott Medal, Newberry Medal, Coretta Scott King Award, Golden Kite Award, or Scott O'Dell Historical Fiction Award). Resulting entries are sparse, offering only a one-sentence summary and basic facts about the book, but teachers may still find the database useful if they're actively in search of tested titles for teaching U.S. history.
Finally, visitors can find basic suggestions on where to look locally for field trip destinations under "Field Trips."
The Milwaukee Art Museum's collection includes more than 20,000 works of art ranging in date from antiquity to the present, and specializing in American decorative arts, German Expressionism, Haitian art, and American art after 1960. This website presents more than 200 pieces from the museum's collection. These works include paintings and sculptures, including several 20th-century works from Haiti; photographs, including Civil War-era portraits and masterpieces from the Great Depression era; prints and drawings primarily from French, Italian, German, and Flemish artists in the 17th-19th centuries; and a small collection of decorative arts, primarily furniture pieces from the early United States.
Beyond the website's Collection section, more artwork is on display in the Exhibitions section, which includes a selection of images from more than 25 current and past exhibitions. A highlight is the exhibit dedicated to the groundbreaking work of Milwaukee industrial designer Brooks Stevens. Here, visitors can view detailed images of some of his most famous designs, which include the Miller Brewing Company logo, the Evinrude outboard motor, and the Oscar Meyer Weinermobile.
The more than 3,500 full-text documents available on this website address the legal, economic, political, diplomatic, and government history of the U.S. Documents are divided into five time periods—pre-18th, 18th, 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries—and include treaties, presidential papers and addresses, and colonial charters, as well as state and federal constitutional and legal documents.
The materials are categorized into 64 document collections as well, such as American Revolution, Federalist Papers, slavery, Native Americans, Confederate States of America, World War II, Cold War, Indochina, Soviet-American diplomacy, and September 11, 2001. By clicking "What's New," the latest digitized documents become available. Material also can be accessed through an alphabetical list of 350 more specific categories, keyword searching, and advanced searching. Most of these documents are directly related to American history, but the site includes some materials on European and modern diplomatic history.
This website functions as an easy-to-maneuver and reader-friendly website for gathering information about Arkansas and its impact on American history. Entries are divided into two categories: text and media. Both include subdivisions based on alphabetical listings or gallery images (respectively) in addition to category, type, time period, race and ethnicity, and gender. The Media section offers numerous photos, maps, documents, and video and audio resources. Entries include suggested readings, related links, and media galleries, when applicable.
Some of the more useful features of the site includes a calendar describing events in Arkansas’s history on each day, as well as a photo of the day from the Arkansas gallery. An overview entry provides general information about the state for those beginning to conduct research about Arkansas, and a breadcrumb trail at the top of each page helps readers retrace their steps while visiting the site—a feature users will find very helpful.
Educators will also find more than 100 lesson plans marked by The Butler Center—when planning for topics such as the Civil War, Korean War, and who’s who in Arkansas history. Lesson plans are in PDF format.
Teachers and students will enjoy exploring how the Razorback State played a key role in U.S. history. Teachers will also find the lesson plans from the Butler Center a useful resource for classroom instruction.
This PBS documentary provides many useful resources for teaching the long and influential history of Jewish Americans. At the heart of this video production is the struggle between identity and assimilation. While Jews in America often faced struggles integrating into new communities, their story is common to other immigrant groups and at the same time a "quintessentially American story."
The site is divided into six main sections. Educators will be particularly interested in the historical background offered in Jewish Life in America (which is divided into eleven subsections), the 30 video segments from the documentary, four lesson plans in For Educators, and links to online resources for teaching Jewish American history.
One noteworthy section of the site is Share Your Story. By allowing Jewish American viewers to submit recipes, immigration stories, or family traditions, this site provides an interactive platform that could enhance any classroom. Students can investigate, research, and conduct interviews with family or friends of Jewish heritage and submit their investigations online. Teachers will also find that the video segments, textual information, and online submission tool can work well together to compliment thematic units on immigration, ethnic identity, and moments in history specific to the Jewish experience.