Invincible Cities

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Photo, 310 Marina Way, Jose Vergara, 2004, Invincible Cities
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This site offers two exhibits featuring the photography of Camilo Jose Vergara that document decay and renewal in the "post-industrial" cities of Camden, NJ, and Richmond, CA, since the 1970s. The collection of more than 450 photographs explores the transformation of these cities' urban landscapes through the erosion of their "late 19th and early 20th-century architectural grandeur" through "their subsequent neglect and abandonment" to "scattered efforts at renewal." The site has an essay by Vergara that explains his work and introduces the two collections. The Camden exhibit has a large collection of photographs, organized into 24 themed galleries, and an introductory essay by Howard Gillette placing the photographs in a historical context. The Richmond exhibit is somewhat smaller, with 10 themed galleries.

The collection of photographs can be browsed by theme or by using the site's interactive city maps. Some of the themes are geographic; some are tours surveying an area of the city. Other themes group images sharing similar characteristics such as post-industrial, churches, and people. Additionally, some of the images are linked to views of the subject at different periods to show change over time. The site also has a feature allowing visitors to post comments on the photographs. This site is of interest to anyone researching urban history in the 20th century or these two cities specifically.

Szarkowski: How To See

Description

According to the History of Photography Podcasts website:

"During his 29-year tenure as director of the photography department at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, curator and photographer John Szarkowski (1925-2007) changed the way the world saw photography."

This recording of Jeff Curto's class session introduces Szarkowski's work.

Union Pacific Railroad Museum [IA] Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 01/07/2009 - 17:32
Description

The Union Pacific Railroad Museum houses one of the oldest corporate collections in the nation. It includes artifacts, photographs, and documents that trace the development of the railroad and the American West. The Union Pacific Collection dates to the mid-1800s, featuring original editions of reports from survey teams that searched for the best land route to join the nation, east to west. Surveying equipment, early rail equipment, and artifacts from the construction of the nation's first transcontinental railroad tell the story of one of the world's construction marvels.

The site offers exhibits.

A Day On, Not a Day Off

Date Published
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Logo, Martin Luther King Jr. Day of Service
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Happy Martin Luther King Jr. Day! Since 1994 and the signing into law of the King Holiday and Service Act, the holiday is a "day on, not a day off," a national day of service. According to the King Center, King's widow, Coretta Scott King, described the holiday this way:

Every King Holiday has been a national "teach-in" on the values of nonviolence, including unconditional love, tolerance, forgiveness and reconciliation, which are so desperately needed to unify America. It is a day of intensive education and training in Martin's philosophy and methods of nonviolent social change and conflict-reconciliation. The Holiday provides a unique opportunity to teach young people to fight evil, not people, to get in the habit of asking themselves, "what is the most loving way I can resolve this conflict?"

Maybe you've given your students background on the holiday and prepared them to get involved in the local community today. But Martin Luther King Jr. Day shouldn't be the only day your students are ready to serve—and King isn't the only topic that can connect service and history education.

More Than One Day of Service

President Barack Obama's United We Serve initiative calls on citizens to come together to improve their communities. The government Martin Luther King Jr. Day of Service website reflects that call, and provides resources you can draw on throughout the year.

Helping to preserve history can be service, too!

Use this site to familiarize yourself (and your students, depending on their grade level and readiness to organize projects) with service opportunities in your area. Search by city, state, or zip code; register your own project; or read up on planning a project with the site's detailed Action Guides.

Now consider your curriculum and your local community. Don't limit yourself to Martin Luther King Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement, or to the third Monday of January. Think about the Great Depression, the New Deal, the Progressive Era, the women's rights movement, the victory gardens and scrap drives of the World War II homefront, the Berlin Airlift. What sorts of projects might you guide students in initiating (or at least considering) for any of these topics or time periods that would also help them learn—and feel connected to—historical content?

Serving to Preserve

Helping to preserve history can be service, too! Listen to teacher James Percoco speak on teaching with memorials and monuments and think about your local history. Are there places that need young volunteers? Locations that students could research and then prepare their own interpretive materials?

Use Martin Luther King Jr. Day as a reminder not just to memorialize history, but to empower students to connect with, interpret, and preserve it in the service of the present!

Resources on Martin Luther King, Jr.

Sounds good, you say, but maybe you need resources for teaching about Martin Luther King Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement, before you head off onto wider projects. Last year, we recommended a variety of online resources in our Jan. 13 blog entry. Here are those recommendations again—and a few new ones! Remember to search our Website Reviews and try our Lesson Plan Gateway for even more links to great materials.

John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum

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Photo, President and Mrs. Kennedy in motorcade, May 3, 1961
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This website is devoted to the life, work, and memory of John F. Kennedy, the 35th president of the U.S. Of primary interest to historians and teachers are the "Historical Resources and Education" and "Public Programs" sections of the website, which shed light on important events in early 1960s political history, including the Cuban missile crisis, the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement, the Peace Corps, the space program, and the 1963 Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. Users unfamiliar with the history of the Kennedy White House might begin with the "Timeline," which puts events important to the Kennedy administration in a larger political and cultural context, or "Biographies and Profiles," which presents a Kennedy family tree and profiles of early 1960s notables such as Fidel Castro, Robert McNamara, and Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. "White House Diary" further familiarizes users with Kennedy's day-to-day activities as President.

The website also includes hundreds of historical sources including speeches, photographs, telegrams, correspondence, eulogies for Bobby Kennedy, JFK, and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (all accessible through an Advanced Search feature), and transcripts of more than 170 oral interviews with notables such as John Kenneth Galbraith (Harvard University economic professor and Ambassador to India), Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, singer Harry Belafonte, and President Gerald Ford. In some cases, the original audio files of speeches are also included. Several lesson plans designed for elementary, middle, and high school students use materials from this archive to address topics such as Kennedy's inaugural address, the Cuban missile crisis, and the civil rights movement.

Jimmy Carter

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Photo, Jimmy Carter National Historical Site, 1966
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This well-designed website, companion to the PBS documentary, offers a wide variety of secondary material on the Carter presidency. "People and Places" offers short profiles of Carter, his wife Rosalynn, his brother Billy, Carter's White House staff (collectively known as "The Georgia Mafia"), Speaker of the House Thomas P. "Tip" O_Neill, and Vice-President Walter Mondale.

It also offers short essays on key events of Carter's presidency, including the election of 1976, the Egyptian-Israeli peace talks at Camp David, the Iranian hostage crisis, Carter's July 1979 "Crisis of Confidence" speech, and the election of 1980. Many of the essays link to special features, such as the extensive media coverage of the Iranian hostage crisis and the text of the "Crisis of Confidence" speech. "Teacher's Guide" offers nine suggestions for classroom learning activities in four categories: economics, civics, history, and geography. The site also includes a detailed chronology of Carter's life and a small photo gallery with 16 images. This site provides a useful overview of Carter's life and the political and diplomatic history of his presidency.

James Madison's Failed Amendments

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Medallion of James Madison
Question

James Madison proposed 12 amendments to the Constitution, but only 10 were approved. What were the two that were not?

Answer

When the Constitutional Convention sent the proposed Constitution to the states for ratification, Anti-Federalists voiced strong objections to it, especially criticizing the strength it invested in the national government and its lack of explicit protections for the rights of individuals. Politicians in several states were able to secure their states' ratification of the Constitution only with the promise that it would be almost immediately amended.

In 1789, James Madison, then an elected member from Virginia of the First Congress's House of Representatives, proposed 19 amendments meant to answer the objections already raised in the states. The Senate consolidated and trimmed these down to 12, which were approved by Congress and sent out to the states by President Washington in October, 1789.

The states ratified the last 10 of the 12 amendments. They became the first 10 amendments to the Constitution, and are now referred to as the Bill of Rights. Not enough states (10 were needed at the time) ratified the first two of Madison's original 12, however, and they did not become law.

The first of these would have established how members of the House of Representatives would be apportioned to the states. It was drafted to ensure that members of the House would continue to represent small constituencies even as the general population grew, small enough that Representatives would not be too far removed from the concerns of citizens. In addition, keeping the House of Representatives from being too small was thought to protect against its becoming a kind of oligarchy. Congress did send this amendment to the states, but the number of states that ratified it was just short of the number needed. Although the proposed amendment did not become law, Congressional apportionment is nevertheless grounded in the Constitution (Article 1, Section 2, Paragraph 3) and the total number of members of the House of Representatives is set by federal statute (currently at 435).

The second of Madison's 12 amendments forbade Congress from giving itself a pay raise: Congress could vote for a raise but it would only apply from the beginning of the next Congress. This amendment also failed to gather the required number of state ratifications in the years after it was introduced. In 1982, however, Gregory Watson, a university student doing research for a government class, ran across a description of this amendment and realized that it remained "alive" because it had included no language in it about a window of time in which it had to gain the needed number of state ratifications. Watson organized a successful effort to lobby various state legislatures, seeking their ratification of the amendment. As a result, the needed number was eventually reached and this amendment, first proposed in 1789, became the 27th (and most recent) amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1992.

Bibliography

Richard E. Labunski, James Madison and the Struggle for the Bill of Rights (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).

Jackson Turner Main, The Anti-federalists: critics of the Constitution, 1781-1788 (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2004)

David J. Siemers, The Antifederalists: men of great faith and forbearance (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003).

John R. Vile, A Companion to the United States Constitution and Its Amendments, 4th edition (Westport, Ct.: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2006).

John W. Dean, "The Telling Tale of the Twenty-Seventh Amendment: A Sleeping Amendment Concerning Congressional Compensation Is Later Revived," September 27, 2002 (at FindLaw).

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Portrait etching of James Madison and detail of broadside, printed by Bennett Wheeler, Providence, R.I., 1789.

James Madison medallion, frontispiece of William Cabell Rives, History of the Life and Times of James Madison (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1859).

Nixtontapes.org

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Photo, Nixon standing with Lyndon Johnson, 1971, NARA
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In February 1971 to July 1973, President Richard Nixon secretly began recording phone conversations and meetings, compiling thousands of hours of tape. Created in 2007 by a Texas A&M University history professor, this website intends to provide "the most complete digitized Nixon tape collection in existence."

At present, only a fraction of the recordings are available. Visitors may listen to MP3 versions of over 500 conversations organized by primary conversation participant; 29 conversations organized by topic themes; and more than 2,000 hours of conversations organized by the date of their release to the general public.

Though the site promises that all recordings will eventually be accompanied by full transcripts, accompanying material is spotty. Some recordings are accompanied by corresponding entries from the presidential daily diary, some by general outlines of the recording's topics, and a handful by full transcripts. The recordings vary in quality, from fully audible to inaudibly faint or noise-obscured.

The website is not searchable (the search engine on the home page searches the web at large). As it stands, it may be useful to educators as a casual introduction to the recordings for students, but locating specific content (to accompany lesson plans or complement events being taught in class) would require significant time.