Lake Forest Preservation Foundation
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"The Lake Forest Preservation Foundation protects the historic visual character of Lake Forest."
Joe Jelen on Google's Art Project
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Bringing Back the Arts
Unfortunately, the arts are being squeezed out of school budgets and students’ schedules. Most would agree, though, that the arts play a vital role in fostering students’ creativity and helping students ask the “big questions” about the world around them. Fortunately, integrating the visual arts into any classroom just became a bit more fun with the launch of Google Art Project.
The Art Project lends itself particularly well to classrooms with interactive whiteboards with which students can feel like they are standing in the museum.
Google Art Project allows viewers to explore selected museums and zoom in on works of art. For those familiar with Google Map’s “street view” feature, the site functions in much the same way. Users feel like they are walking through the museum and can look up and down at museum features. When a work of art catches your eye, simply click on the image and you can zoom in on incredible detail of the painting or sculpture (see Google’s video about using Art Project). The Art Project lends itself particularly well to classrooms with interactive whiteboards with which students can feel like they are standing in the museum. I personally like the ability to take my time with a painting and have another browser tab open to find out more about a painting as questions arise in my head.
Virtual Field Trips
My students get excited anytime I mention the words “field trip,” and with good reason. Field trips not only offer students a get-out-of-school-free card, but also offer them a chance to learn through interacting and experiencing. When money and time are tight, field trips are cut. That is why I am thrilled that technology is allowing students to take virtual field trips. These virtual field trips are growing more interactive and more content rich every day. Google Art Project is the latest development in expanding student access to these rich sites.
A benefit of viewing works of art in a museum is being able to see and appreciate their relative size. As a simple image, one cannot appreciate how small the Mona Lisa is or how large Pablo Picasso’s Guernica is. With Google Art Project, students can get a sense of this by seeing paintings hanging in the museum without leaving their classroom.
Google Art Project provides information and related material when you click on a work of art. You and your students can also create collections of selected pieces to share. This makes it very easy to set up a gallery of artwork from a particular time period or region from different museums.
Using Art in the Classroom
One instructional technique may be to require students to play art detective as they solve when and where an artist lived and produced their work.
The Art Project offers several interesting possibilities to link history with the visual arts. A nice way to begin a lesson might be to have students “walk into the painting,” where students pretend to actually enter the painting and describe the scene using all their senses. Understanding works of art often requires students ask the same inquiry questions they ask in history class. Therefore, one instructional technique may be to require students to play art detective as they solve when and where an artist lived and produced their work. It may also be useful for you and your students to brush up on some of the terminology with which to discuss visual art. This way, students are seeing another adult (aside from their art teacher) model an appreciation of art.
Another instructional idea that blends history with understanding art is to select a group of romantic paintings, a group of realist paintings, and a group of impressionist paintings and discuss the different styles of paintings and the emotions each elicits. For example, many romantic paintings glorify subjects and can stir feelings of nationalism, while realist paintings can capture the daily hardship and struggles individuals must endure. Teachers can discuss with students how different styles of paintings capture prevalent ideas and emotions of the artists’ societies.
Art is also a great way to teach students about culture. Students could use Google Art Project to put together a collection of art related to a specific culture. Paintings can also teach students about trade networks. Often, paintings feature items or styles not native to the artist’s home country. Thus explaining, for instance, how the porcelain cups, featured in a painting, found their way from China to Spain could be a good lesson for students.
Some of the museums in the Art Project have interesting lesson plans that can accompany works of art in the museum. Check out these lesson plans from the Smithsonian and lesson plans from the Museum of Modern Art.
While the current offerings of museums are limited in the Art Project, the possibilities of the site are exciting as art becomes democratized.
Certainly, nothing can compare to physically being in the museum, but Google Art Project is making the world a little smaller, allowing us to visit multiple museums from one site.
For more information
Joe Jelen introduces you to other useful tech and digital tools in his blog entries on document cameras and online timeline tools. He also models one technique for using whiteboards to explore visual primary sources in the video "Zoom-in Inquiry."
Teachinghistory.org's co-director Daisy Martin has some suggestions for teaching with the visual arts, with plenty of links to further arts-related resources. Also try browsing our Museums and Historic Sites database for art museums in your area!
National Archives Launches DocsTeach
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With the National Archive's DocsTeach, educators can find primary sources and the tools to present and interpret them on the same website.
Officially launched September 20, DocsTeach brings more than 3,000 primary sources together with seven online activities, each designed to reinforce specific classroom skills. Register for free, and log in to browse or search the site's photographs, speeches, letters, drawings, memos, video clips, maps, and other sources, dating from 1754 to the present day. Bookmark those that interest you, and head over to the site's "Activities" section.
Here, you can incorporate your chosen sources into online activities adaptable to students at all grade levels. Save activities to access later—including in the classroom.
Activities include:
- Find a Sequence: Have students arrange primary sources in a particular order. DocsTeach suggests using this activity to prompt students to determine the chronological order of sources, or to order steps in a process (for instance, which documents represent which steps in the veto process? In the drafting of the U.S. Constitution?).
- Focusing on Details: Use five different tools to focus student attention on specific sections of a primary source. Do you want your students to focus on a certain facial expression before being distracted by the rest of a photograph? Use "Zoom/Crop,” "Spotlight," or "White Out/Black Out." How about removing a few key words from a document and having students determine, from the context, what they might be? Or pointing out the date and other contextualizing evidence in a handwritten letter?
- Making Connections: Arrange primary sources in a particular order, and have students write arguments for why one source leads to another. Choose sources that lead up to a major historical event—a telegram on the shelling of Fort Sumter might lead to Abraham Lincoln's suspension of the writ of habeas corpus, for instance. Or maybe your sources are thematically related—a 1918 poster using a woman in uniform to recruit male Marines leads to a 1942 WACC recruitment brochure leads to a 1990 poster calling women to join the U.S. Army
- Seeing the Big Picture: Match primary sources in related pairs. As students successfully make the matches, they reveal pieces of a larger picture. How do the matched pairs relate to, say, the image of the Declaration of Independence or the 19th Amendment?
- Interpreting Data: Call out particular data points on primary sources incorporating charts and graphs, and embed comments and questions in the source. Guide how students react to the data they see and lead them to ask who gathered it, how they gathered it, and why.
- Mapping History: Use a modern or historical map as a background, and have students place sources in the location they come from or relate to. Where do sources locate New Deal projects? Major battles of the Civil War? Protest marches throughout U.S. history?
- Weighing the Evidence: Present students with primary sources on a particular historical issue, and have them decide whether they support one interpretation or another. Try the causes of the Civil War. Which documents support an economic cause? Which support slavery as a dividing issue?
Write introductions and conclusions to any activity, and publish them to share with other DocsTeach users, if you choose. Or check out the National Archives' sample activities.
At present, only 28 pre-made activities are available, but check back as more users register at the site and share their work.
For more information
Read more about DocsTeach in our Tech for Teachers entry on the website.
Emerging America: Teaching and Learning American History
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Mountain Home Historical Society and Museum
Description
The local historical society, founded in 1961, opened the Elmore County Museum in a vacated Carnegie Library building in 1977. Built in 1908, the museum building is listed on the National Register of Historical Places. Among the artifacts displayed inside are mining, agriculture, and railroad implements. The museum also focuses on the cultural heritage of the community, including Basque, Chinese, and Native American legacies.
The museum offers exhibits.
History of Hidden Killers: Epidemics in America
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Does the swine flu outbreak have you thinking about epidemics in the past? Match the description of the disease with its name from the pull-down menu. (Each is used once and only once.)
Quiz Answer
1. Yellow Fever. Viral infection transmitted by mosquito bites. Symptoms include fever, pain, nausea, and jaundice induced by liver damage. It was brought to America via the Spanish slave trade through the Caribbean to New Orleans. Epidemics began in 1693, and centered on port cities—especially, after 1822, in the South. An outbreak in 1878 in New Orleans was the last great U.S. epidemic, and a smaller outbreak in 1905 in New Orleans was the last of any magnitude.
2. Measles. Viral disease spread by coughing. Symptoms include fever, conjunctivitis, and a clustered, spotted rash. Endemic in Europe, where it was not ordinarily fatal because the population had a certain degree of resistance. When it made its debut in the Americas, however, where the Native Americans had never been exposed to it, it killed vast swaths of people.
3. Cholera. Bacterial disease transmitted through eating or drinking contaminated food or water. Symptoms develop rapidly and include diarrhea, a drop in blood pressure, and shock. The first epidemic in America happened in 1832, spread from Europe. Other outbreaks continued through the 19th century, such as one spread by gold seekers to California between 1849 through 1855. The last U.S. outbreak happened in New York City in 1910.
4. Typhus. Bacterial disease transmitted from one infected person to another by lice bites. Symptoms include headache, fever, rash, chills, sores, and delirium. Epidemics have typically occurred during times of war and famine, or in widespread unsanitary living conditions, such as those in prisons or camps. In 19th-century America, epidemics of this disease occurred in 1837 in Philadelphia, in various encampments in the Civil War, and in Baltimore, Memphis, and Washington, in the decade after the war.
5. HIV/AIDS. Viral disease that originated in Africa early in the 20th century, but which was not recognized until it became epidemic in the United States early in the 1980s. It is transmitted through contact with an infected person's bodily fluids. The disease weakens the body's immune system and thereby makes it susceptible to infection by other diseases. In the United States, about 1.7 million people have been infected with this disease, and more than 580,000 have died.
6. Influenza. Viral disease that becomes epidemic when new strains are spread from animals, such as birds or pigs, to humans. A pandemic in 1918-1919 killed over 50 million people worldwide, most of them healthy young adults, probably because of overreaction by strong immune systems. In the U.S., over 500,000 died—more than the number of American fatalities in World War I, which occurred at the same time. In many U.S. cities, business came to a halt during the height of the epidemic.
For more information
For all things illness, check out the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. From scientific descriptions of disease to an interactive on another recent epidemic (remember SARS?), the CDC provide information more technical and health-related than historical, but may still house some resources of use.
The Philip S. Hench Walter Reed Yellow Fever Collection archives the U.S. Army Yellow Fever Commission's findings on yellow fever in the early 20th century.
The National Library of Medicine's Medicine in America: 1619-1914 digital library includes a pro-inoculation minister's views on the 1721 Boston smallpox epidemic.
As a recent epidemic, much has been written on AIDS; try the New York Times' AIDS at 20 archive for articles on the rise of AIDS and its study since the 1980s.
An earlier NHEC quiz, on vaccinations, includes further suggestions for health-and-illness-related resources.
Sources
- Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (accessed December 3, 2009).
- "Demonstration at the Red Cross Emergency Ambulance Station in Washington, D.C., during the influenza pandemic of 1918," 1918, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division (accessed December 3, 2009).
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Teaching with Artwork
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What first comes to mind when you hear the phrase "primary sources?" Famous documents such as the Declaration of Independence? Newspaper articles reporting on Pearl Harbor? Letters from soldiers during the Civil War? Maybe you think of visual sources—antique maps or Lewis Hine photographs.
But what about artwork? What does a 1796 portrait of George Washington tell us—about the man, about the time, about the artist? What does an 1851 painting of Washington crossing the Delaware say? It can't be a primary source for the actual crossing, but what information does it convey about American mythology and historical understanding? What information can students bring away from a piece of art?
Like all primary sources, artwork offers unique opportunities and pitfalls when introduced to the classroom. Carolyn Halpin-Healy, of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, suggests seven steps students (and their teachers) should take when approaching art. After processing their initial emotional reactions and describing what they see, students move on to considering the art's original context and historical connections. They then reassess the piece using their new, fuller understanding.
For a sense of this process—though not a full exploration—watch professor David Jaffee analyze two 19th-century artworks, a family portrait and a popular print.
Interested in trying out this approach for yourself? For a ready-to-run lesson, EDSITEment's "Midnight Ride of Paul Revere: Fact, Fiction, and Artistic License" guides high school students in interpreting a 1931 painting of Paul Revere's ride.
If you have the time and resources for a field trip, search Teachinghistory.org's Historic Sites and Museums database for museums where students can examine art in person. Also consider contacting local museums about professional development opportunities—they may offer pre-trip orientations for teachers or workshops focusing on teaching with art.
If you can't take your students to the art, bring the art to them. The Internet hosts a wealth of virtual collections from museums across the country (and the world). Wherever you live, your students can draw on the resources of the
National Portrait Gallery or the Smithsonian American Art Museum. A keyword search for "art" in Teachinghistory.org's Website Reviews brings up more than 150 archives and exhibits, free to access online.
And for suggestions of even more resources, see how our co-director, Daisy Martin, answers the question, "What resources or techniques would you recommend for teaching using art and its analysis in the social studies/U.S. history classroom?" in Ask a Master Teacher.
Sleuthing with Maps
Description
From the MAGPI website:
Maps are windows to the cultural, political, and physical world around us. They capture a space in time and define it according to parameters set by the mapmaker for an intended audience. Who is that audience? What did they want to know? What did the mapmaker want to portray? Why? Delve into an exploration of historical maps and the surprises they yield.
Objectives:
Participants will be able to:
• Understand the parts of a map and their relevance to historical investigation
• Demonstrate improved observation and questioning skills based on the careful analysis of historical maps
Tasks in brief:
• Identify the general parts of a map
• Identify characteristics of a map that aid historical analysis
• Use these characteristics to analyze pre-selected historical maps
Registration Deadline
Sponsoring Organization
MAGPI, Library of Congress
Target Audience
Teachers, curriculum specialists, staff development trainers, librarians and university instructors, media specialists
Start Date
Cost
Free, must be a member of MAGPI
Duration
One and a half hours
United States Lighthouse Society, Chesapeake Chapter [VA]
Description
The Chapter focuses on implementing the U.S. Lighthouse Society's goals in the Chesapeake Bay area, particularly with regard to the lighthouses and lightships of Virginia and Maryland: It seeks to preserve and restore existing lighthouses and protect, preserve, and disseminate lighthouse history.
The chapter offers educational programs (specifically, speakers available for school presentations).
Memphis Heritage [TN]
Description
The organization works to educate and coordinate individuals and groups to save, improve, reuse, and maintain architecturally and historically significant buildings, open spaces, streets, neighborhoods, parks, and cultural artifacts of Shelby County, Tennessee.
The organization offers tours.