The National Women's History Museum, currently a virtual museum, is dedicated to showcasing the impressive history of American women. There are a number of online virtual exhibits available on the website.
Eighth-grade American history educator Eric Langhorst describes the "Book Blitz," an activity he uses to encourage students to explore the historical fiction novels available in their school library.
To listen to this "how to" podcast, scroll down to the blog archive links along the right hand side of the site. From there select "2009" and "January." Now scroll down to the end of the Friday, January 09, 2009 entry; and push play.
The first question likely on your mind is, "How can I mesh humanitarian law with history? It's a bit off-topic, isn't it?" You may be interested in the topic, and see its merit, but not know how to include it in your classroom.
The Red Cross makes a point of listing ways that history and humanitarian law intersect. Their examples include
Still not convinced? Try reading their standards guide.
The site contains a curriculum which specifically details factors such as the amount of time needed for each module component and the required preparation.
Maybe a full curriculum won't really fit in your classroom. That doesn't mean the site should be written off. Try their resources page. Here, you can find a glossary, a teaching guide, suggested supplemental films and videos, articles, websites, and examples of student work (art and poetry). Perhaps most useful of all, the site offers a series of lessons on the Civil War, as viewed from a humanitarian perspective.
This website offers brief articles on roughly 65 topics within Minnesota history. Each article in turn consists of text, images pulled from the Minnesota Historical Society, a bibliography, and a list of references (divided into primary, secondary, and web resources) for those interested in further information.
The content can be filtered by category (such as event or structure), topic (from "African Americans" to "women"), or era, making it easier to find items of interest.
Currently, the site is in beta testing. The Minnesota Historical Society invites comments from all site users, and plans to greatly expand the number of available articles throughout 2012. In the meantime, there's a wealth of information available ranging in content from the oldest sauna in the state (and most likely the country) to a major 1800s African American newspaper.
The Crailo State Historic Site, named for the Crailo farm in the Netherlands, consists of an early 18th-century home. The home holds a museum presenting the history of the early Dutch immigrants in the northern Hudson Valley.
The site offers exhibits, guided tours, outreach programs for schools, and hearthside cooking programs. Reservations are required for school tours, outreach programs, and cooking programs.
Hyde Hall was built by George Clark and is one of the foremost examples of a neoclassical country mansion in the United States. The home was completed in 1833, and was placed on the national register of historic places in 1964 after the Glimmerglass state park was created around it. Today, the home is open to visitors year round.
The state historic site offers guided tours of the home. The website offers a photo-tour of the house as well as a history of the house.
The Afton Historical Society Museum presents the history of Afton, Minnesota, originally settled for its proximity to French fur traders. Located within the 1868 Congregational Church, the museum holds vernacular artifacts, military artifacts, costumes, historic toys and games, photographs, and other items.
The museum offers exhibits and vintage loom demonstrations. The website offers brochures for self-guided area walking tours.
Founded in 1913, the Society is headquartered at the Samuel Dale Stevens Memorial Building. This museum houses the Society's collection of early American furniture and changing exhibits in the Main Gallery; an extensive archive of historic documents, photographs, and maps; a book shop, and staff offices. The 1789 Johnson Cottage, adjacent to the museum, is the last surviving artisan's cottage in North Andover's Old Center. The Cottage shows the life of an average family in the 19th century. The 1715 Parson Barnard House is the Society's other historic house. Visitors will see furnishings that reflect the changes in lifestyle as experienced by four early inhabitants of the house from 1715 through 1830.
The society offers tours, lectures, workshops, research library access, and educational and recreational programs; the museums offer exhibits.
The Museum presents visitors with exhibits brimming with art and artifacts; contemporary, interactive areas for children and adults; an historic shipyard with five of the original 19th-century buildings; a Victorian-era shipyard owner's home; an active waterfront; and a life-size sculptural representation of the largest wooden sailing vessel ever built.
The museum offers exhibits, tours, boat cruises, classes, educational programs, research library access, and educational and recreational events.
Keith Barton of Indiana University and Linda Levstik of the University of Kentucky wanted to understand the "official" story of American history so often presented in classrooms and textbooks. What happens to aspects of history that don’t fit the way we usually teach U.S. history? And how do students respond?
Barton and Levstik interviewed 48 children, grades 5–8, to see how middle-schoolers understand the significance of particular events. Students were asked to choose from a number of historical events in order to determine which eight to include on a timeline of the last 500 years.
Many students alighted on a central theme in U.S. history: steadily expanding rights and opportunities. While stories like this help structure students' thinking about American history, traditional themes (such as perpetual progress or expanding freedoms) left them ill-equipped to deal with issues like racial inequality or political dissent.
This study suggests that middle-grade students may need help grasping the complexities of the past or finding a place for stories that don’t fit common narratives. The authors proposed that teachers expose students to more complex and diverse perspectives by identifying what such narratives leave out. How has progress not been achieved? Where have freedoms not been expanded? What are the exceptions, the outliers, the cases that don’t fit? The researchers believe that students can learn traditional thematic narratives, while at the same time exploring the richness and complexity of history.
When Barton and Levstik interviewed the students, they found a core group of themes emerged from the events students chose as the most significant. Stories of national origin, American exceptionality, expanding freedoms, and technological progress consistently appeared among the students' choices. Such themes represented an "official version" of American history that all students seemed to recognize.
Some students viewed events as important despite the fact that their themes did not easily fit into the more popular narratives. Racism and sexism directly contradict themes of progress and expanding freedoms. Other events like the Great Depression and the Vietnam War fly in the face of American exceptionality. In both cases, however, students found it challenging to explain why they found these events significant. While students were convinced of the importance of such events, they struggled to reconcile them with common themes of U.S. history.
American history presents a wide variety of events and themes. Some, like our nation’s heritage regarding race, class, and gender, pose particular challenges. Accustomed to justifying the importance of events by referencing a few common themes, many students find themselves at a loss when confronted by events they know are important, but which don’t seem to fit the stories they are used to hearing. Lacking an overarching framework to help make sense of such events, they develop overly simplistic explanations to reconcile jarring events with the official story. As the sample application below shows, their explanations may put events together, but at the expense of historical accuracy.
When learning about the Great Depression, one group of students demonstrated a characteristic dilemma. As far as they knew, throughout its history the United States had been on a steady march of economic progress. Consequently, students weren't sure how the Great Depression fit into this story:
As these quotes demonstrate, students had accumulated a wide range of conceptions about the Great Depression. They knew bad things had happened, but thought these occurred uniformly to all Americans. As a result, they concluded that the nation had been punished for being too prosperous or self-satisfied. They entirely missed the fact that the Great Depression occurred for many specific and complex reasons, and affected different Americans in dramatically diverse ways.
Keith C. Barton and Linda S. Levstik, "'It Wasn’t a Good Part of History': National Identity and Students' Explanations of Historical Significance," Teachers College Record 99, no. 3 (Spring 1998): 478–513.