Paul Dickler of Neshaminy High School reviews several points he considers important in teaching on 9/11 and terrorism, as well as in teaching history more generally.
Audio and video options are available.
DocsTeach, a National Archives and Records Administration project, recognizes the need to bring primary sources into your classroom. To assist in the effort, NARA has pulled together thousands of primary sources, as well as a selection of pre-made activities and tools for building your own primary-source-centric activities.
Documents offers exactly what it sounds like it would—primary sources. The sources are divided into chronological categories—Revolution and the New Nation, Expansion and Reform, Civil War and Reconstruction, Development of the Industrial United States, Emergence of Modern America, Great Depression and World War II, Postwar United States, and Contemporary United States. Results can then be narrowed further by selecting audio/visual, charts/graphics/data, image, map, or written document. If you prefer, you can use a keyword search. All search results are shown with thumbnails to give you a small preview of the sources for your consideration.
Activities provides pre-made classroom activities. These require access to a computer, and are based on the same tools which the site provides for making your own activities. You can also sort them by historical thinking skill—chronological thinking, comprehension, analysis and interpretation, research capabilities, and issues-analysis and decision-making. Registering gives you access to a much larger collection, many of which are created by other educators. There is no registration cost.
If you're registered, consider making your own activity for use by yourself and others. There are tools which help students to create sequences, participate in analytical discussion, connect documents, geographically map documents, use documents to gain an understanding of the bigger picture, weigh evidence, and examine source context.
Take a moment to peruse the Teacher Resources as well. Here, you can find information on national history standards, using DocsTeach activities in the classroom, Bloom's taxonomy, and the National Council of Social Studies.
Read our Digital Classroom article on DocsTeach for more detailed information on using the site.
Michael Radu and Stephen Gale, co-chairs of the Foreign Policy Research Institute's Center on Terrorism, Counter-Terrorism, and Homeland Security, present the FPRI's annual report on the current state of the War on Terrorism.
Norman Ornstein discusses the changing U.S national political atmosphere following the 9/11 attacks and his opinions on these changes, as well as speaking briefly on his career as a political writer.
To listen to this interview, scroll to "Norman Ornstein" and select "Watch the Video."
The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has digitized thousands of formerly secret documents declassified to comply with Freedom of Information Act requests.
Keyword search capabilities are provided for the complete site. In addition, there are eight collections designated as "frequently requested records" that total nearly 8,000 documents. These collections cover a number of Cold War topics: CIA involvement in the 1954 coup in Guatemala; convicted spies Ethel and Julius Rosenberg; the 1961 Bay of Pigs affair; and two well-known espionage incidents.
Additional topics include POW MIAs in Vietnam, human rights abuses in Latin America, and UFOs. A disclaimer notes that some material cannot be disclosed due to national security laws, and released pages often have material deleted or blacked out. Still, the material offered is voluminous and useful for studying Cold War foreign policy and military history.
The Company's museum displays two pieces of it original equipment, along with early fire company minutes and other memorabilia such as helmets and parade uniforms and attire, as well as pictures that have taken through the years.
The museum offers exhibits.
This is the third in a series of film reviews reprinted from the Journal of American History. These reviews model ways of looking critically at popular films, documentaries, miniseries, and other history-based features. Look for one each month!
When historians of American government and society recall the past decade or two, they are likely to feature economic recession and state intervention, new information and networking technologies, gay rights, the "war on terror," and national elections. Environmental historians may add global climate change to the list, but even more certainly they will add a string of disasters that can only be called "natural" with an asterisk, like the batting record of a juiced ballplayer.
Floods, epidemics, hurricanes, wildfires, mud slides and cave-ins, even famine, invasive species, and toxic releases are hardly new. They are among the normal, albeit irregular and abrupt disruptions that have come and gone since the big bang. The ingredients of recent disasters remain natural, but the consequences have grown ever more colossal with human intervention. With "progress," sources of inconvenience and insecurity in everyday life are corralled and concentrated someplace else. Still, they seem ever in wait on the periphery of sight. States of emergency have become regional rather than local or personal, wholesale rather than retail events. For most people, especially the affluent, experience with disasters is less frequent but also more overwhelming.
The explosion and well breach that began April 20, 2010, in the Gulf of Mexico—the BP/Deepwater Horizon spill—is but the latest, headline-grabbing instance. The public seems at least as eager as the perpetrators to get it out of the news. Disaster fatigue is now ubiquitous in America: "Someone, quickly make everything right again (or close enough to it), so we can put it behind us." Public concern has proven hard to sustain for survivors of Hurricane Katrina and the earthquake in Haiti and hard to stir for new, even larger cataclysms, such as for Pakistan after the July 2010 monsoon.
The fact is, certain kinds of disasters, including giant "accidental" spills of nasty stuff ("hazmat incidents," in emergency management lingo), have long been routine. The Oil Spill Intelligence Report, which has been logging major releases since 1978, has counted an average of about 240 per year. In other words, they are predictable, even if avoidable, near daily events. And that is counting only the well-documented, dramatic (over ten thousand-gallon) cases. A full sixth of those spills have been larger than the U.S. standard: the one that is the subject of Black Wave. That spill began soon after midnight, March 24, 1989, when the supertanker Exxon Valdez ran hard aground in Prince William Sound, near bucolic Cordova, Alaska.
Ever since, reporters have used the size of that one spill (disputed but usually estimated at 11 million gallons) as the measure of all others. Like Watergate in politics, it set the standard for failure in environmental stewardship. For example, observers devoted extraordinary resources to determine whether BP/Deepwater Horizon in 2010 was spilling as much as Exxon in 1989, first in total and then per week, then per day. Now that the latest bp spill (like dozens before it) has proven radically larger than the Exxon Valdez, Americans might wonder if the benchmark will change. I bet not, and by design and example the documentary Black Wave provides a convincing explanation.
The strongest element of the film's persuasion is its exquisite before-spill setting: the breathtaking landscape and seascape, purple mountain's majesty, soaring eagles, grazing moose, and gull-trimmed trawlers. The local men and women look like they were ordered out of an L. L. Bean catalog, less the African or Asian minority. They are hardworking, sensible, clean-living, with a keen eye on the horizon, strong but also soft-spoken and grateful for their majestic, bountiful surroundings. Just about everyone seems inherently attuned to nature, community, and nuclear "family values."
And then, one day, out of the blue for all but a prophetic few (fisherman, of course), disaster strikes. A giant, unfeeling, greedy corporation takes a supertanker-sized [dump] on paradise.
You do not have to know much history or science to be outraged. The jaw-dropping before-and-after imagery of Black Wave makes the "legacy of the Exxon Valdez" (the subtitle of the film) undeniably grim. The spill was horrid—huge, ugly, stinky, sticky, deadly, and, it is essential to add, persistent. Clean-up workers are still suffering and dying. The fish and the fleet that marketed them have not and will probably never fully recover.
The chief legacy of the Exxon Valdez may be as a standard of environmental loss, but it can also be remembered for the human failings that caused and followed it. As the documentary well shows, the damage was and remains very much man-made. There was negligence and intrigue, broken promises (or something close enough to it), abuses of power, and cruelty on the part of government regulators, courts, legislators, and most of all the Exxon Corporation. In their wake lie not only the corpses of tens of thousands of wildlife, but also illness, stress, depression, bankruptcy, divorce, substance abuse, and suicide among the local population. The people whom Exxon put out of work and then on temporary payroll to clean up their mess are still suffering and dying from the spill's effects.
A layer of gooey sludge still taints sediments, while Exxon (now Exxon Mobil) invests hundreds of millions of dollars to limit its liability. Eighteen years passed before Exxon paid a dime of the $5 billion it owed Alaskan and native plaintiffs in punitive damages. The corporation only started paying after successfully reducing the award—thanks to the Supreme Court, with the encouragement of Gov. Sarah Palin—by 99 percent. In a couple of days Exxon Mobil profits covered the loss.
One of the film's most stirring scenes features . . . reporters challenging classaction victims of the spill, just outside the court. One journalist asks, in effect, why are you still whining, what with so much recovery effort, time, and money spent since 1989? A perfect retort comes from a knowledgeable, disciplined, and persistent defender of the environment, Dr. Fredericka "Riki" Ott, Cordova's Erin Brockovich, Lois Gibbs, and Karen Silkwood rolled into one. (Ott is also the author of Sound Truth and Corporate Myth$: The Legacy of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill [2005] and Not One Drop: Betrayal and Courage in the Wake of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill [2008].) With barely contained rage, Ott brandishes a jar, like ones that viewers just saw filled on Alaskan shores. It contains a sample of Exxon crude freshly dug from a vast stratum beneath shorelines that were declared "cleaned" a couple of decades ago. The effects of the spill can only be diminished from points of view that seem dumb, superficial, or warped by corporate and government propaganda.
Given this unapologetically one-sided story, there are plenty of points to contest. For example, the filmmakers themselves provide evidence that victims put words in the perpetrators' mouths. Several of the film's featured claims about conventional wisdom in spillrelated science and medicine would not pass peer review. There are significant gaps, for example, between Ott's assertions about toxins and those vetted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Even as a few details are arguably wrong or overstated, they are also short of being crucial to the bottom line.
Two points, though, amount to more than a quibble. The first is the film's treatment of the suicide of Cordova's former mayor Bob Van Brocklin. With a staged serial reading of his suicide note, the film treats him like a martyr to the cause, glorifying an act of self-destruction that may be better considered sad and futile. In a classroom, for sure, the morality and efficacy of suicide or so honoring it deserves careful discussion.
A second point worth discussing is the point of view that the film normalizes. At times, it seems smug, beginning with the assertion that its subject, the Exxon Valdez, was "the worst environmental disaster in North American history." That is more than exaggeration. Limiting attention to oil spills, and discounting the ones North Americans perpetrated overseas, there are at least three that were vastly worse: the Lakeview Gusher of 1910 (278 million gallons in California), the well Ixtoc I in 1979 (140 million gallons in the Gulf of Mexico), and the tanker Odyssey in 1988 (43 million gallons off Nova Scotia).
But these contenders are tougher to frame within the mythology of all-American populism, albeit fostered by a Canadian film crew. Black Wave pumps up the outrage by presuming a chasm between the world that the Exxon Valdez made and the one to which presumptively normal Americans—versus, say, Mexicans (Ixtoc) or Canadians (Odyssey) or for that matter people in Los Angeles—are entitled. Fishermen presumably have a "natural right" to their way of life, to acquire their own boats, and to get a fair return on investments. Everyone, we are told, who works hard should be able to maintain a six-digit salary and purchase a home with a good view, albeit on land stolen from Indians. Government, we are told, should not be cozy with business. . . unless it is mine.
This populist perspective on neglect and desperation of post-spill Cordova is hard to square not only with its own logic but also with some facts, including the infamous flow of federal dollars to Alaska from the lower forty-eight. On average Cordova still has lower unemployment, more home ownership, and higher annual income than the United States as a whole, and a fair share of that success comes from resource exploitation, integrated markets, and the very pipeline that brought the oil to the Valdez in the first place. In the light of recent history (see, for example, Paul Greenberg's Four Fish [2010]), it is hard to think of harvesting wild salmon as more sustainable or ethical than mining oil.
To balance the film, it may be wise to consult supplementary material. There is, for example, a fine list, "Exxon Valdez Oil Spill: Resources for Teachers and Students" (March 2009), as well as a huge, free collection of primary and secondary sources online from the Alaska Resources Library and Information Services as well as a broader-gauged collection edited by James K. Mitchell, The Long Road to Recovery (1996). If the perspective must remain narrow, consider privileging native peoples, whose relationship to the Alaskan environment has had more to do with subsistence and stewardship than entitlement to the American dream. Supplementing the film with such sources and points of view may be the best use of the legacy that the Exxon Valdez sadly began and the lessons that its survivors and Black Wave profess.
This review was first published in the Journal of American History, Vol. 97, No. 3, 911-914, 2010. Reprinted with permission from the Organization of American Historians (OAH).
Visit the Black Wave website here.
What was America's longest-running radio show?
In 1925, Nashville radio station WSM went on the air. Like many early radio stations, it was the voice of a particular commercial enterprise—in this case, the Nashville-based National Life and Accident Insurance Company, which was looking to move beyond sickness and accident insurance into life insurance. WSM program director George D. Hay, who had previously been an announcer on the Barn Dance on a Chicago radio station, organized a Saturday-night show which was also called the "barn dance." Live performances ranged from minstrel acts to military bands, but old-time or traditional string bands performing country music dominated.
The show that preceded the barn dance was a classical music program called the Music Appreciation Hour. One night in 1927 Hay introduced the barn dance by saying, "For the past hour you have been listening to music taken largely from the Grand Opera, but from now on we will present the Grand Ole Opry." The name stuck, and it continued to be broadcast under that name for the next six decades.
Although some "proper" Nashville residents thought the show was not in tune with the city's genteel reputation, it soon became wildly popular. A new radio tower built in 1932 allowed WSM to reach most of the nation with the show, although southerners remained the core of the audience. Whereas commercial media like radio have sometimes been seen as a threat to "traditional" cultures, WSM and the Grand Ole Opry spread and preserved (while it also transformed) southern white rural music.
Charles Reagan Wilson and William Ferris, eds., Encyclopedia of Southern Culture Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1989.
The Texas Archive of the Moving Image (TAMI) hosts more than 1,000 streaming videos about Texas, shot by Texans, or created in Texas. Users who have appropriate footage, including home videos, can have their films digitized and added to the collection free of charge.
Of the four main navigational buttons, the one to pay attention to is "Teach Texas." This opens a page leading to lesson plans; information on how to implement TAMI resources in the classroom; collection browsing options; and "Documenting History," a documentary-making activity.
Lesson plans can be browsed by grade level, starting with a K-3 category, or by general topic. Specific topics covered include the 1900 Galveston hurricane; 20th-century business; oil; Japanese, Italian, and German internment in World War II; festivals; cattle; the Dust Bowl; the aerospace industry; Lyndon B. Johnson and civil rights; the Vietnam War; the World War II home front; and Gulf Coast hurricanes. Lesson plans are structured, offering, for example, objectives; lists of useful prior knowledge and/or activities to engage said knowledge; hooks; the activity itself, including films to watch, questions to address, and readings to complete; worksheets; resources; and lists of Texas state standards.
Using Archival Film in the Classroom holds best practice suggestions for preparation prior to class, in class (before, during, and after a film viewing), and further resources on using film to teach.
Documenting History is a multi-day lesson plan, which culminates in group documentaries discussing local people, events, or items. While the idea is to collect Texas history, the plan can easily be implemented elsewhere without the possibility of adding the videos to the TAMI. In addition, the plan includes information on free video editing software, so, while there are equipment requirements, you do not need your school to possess expensive editing software to put the plan into action.
Finally, Curated Collections offers video sets on home movies, Lyndon B. Johnson, Austin television, local films, Texas and the Vietnam War, Speakers of the Texas House of Representatives, and the U.S.-Mexico frontier.
This vast collection of more than 275,000 digitized images sheds light on many aspects of 20th-century life in Los Angeles, especially the entertainment industry, politics and public issues, and suburban life. The collection is especially strong in images depicting the growth of LA from the turn of the century through its growth spurt between 1920 and 1939, including a series of promotional images designed to attract Midwesterners and east coast businesses to "the City with Promise."
The sheer quantity of photographs—including churches, municipal buildings, streets, and homes—allows users to track the evolution and growth of LA neighborhoods, making this collection especially useful for urban history courses. The collection also includes more than 10,000 photographs drawn from the family albums of a diverse group of Los Angeles residents.
Images can be accessed through a keyword search and limited by date range, though browsing is not yet available. In addition, users can add images to a "personal list" which can then be sorted by author, title, or call number and emailed/printed.