Rochelle Fire Department Museum [IL]
Description
The Rochelle Fire Department Museum presents firefighting history. Exhibits include a 1922 fire engine and historical firefighting equipment.
The museum offers exhibits.
Enon Community Historical Society and Log House [OH]
Description
The Enon Community Historical Society seeks to preserve and share the history of Enon and Mad River Township, OH. To this end, the society operates a log home, built prior to 1851. The home is furnished to depict early 19th-century life in rural Ohio. The collection highlight is a Wheeler Wilson sewing machine, dating to between 1850 and 1861.
The society offers log house tours and research library access. Tours are offered as special events and by appointment.
Hershey - Derry Township Historical Society [PA]
Description
The Hershey - Derry Township Historical Society seeks to preserve and share the history of Hershey and Derry Townships, Dauphin County, Pennsylvania. To this end, the society operates a museum and research center. The museum presents information on Milton Snavely Hershey (1857-1945), the founder of Hershey's, who made chocolate affordable to the masses, and life in the area prior to Hershey. The archives include cemetery listings, obituaries, historic photographs, obituaries, and oral histories, among other items.
The society offers exhibits and archival access.
Burbank Police and Fire Museum [CA]
Description
The Burbank Police and Fire Museum preserves and showcases the past of the Burbank Police and Fire Departments. The museum includes exhibits on all aspects of police and firefighting work.
The museum offers a variety of exhibits, ranging from uniforms to a vintage fire engine, viewable by appointment only; tours for school groups can be arranged. The website offers a brief history of the museum, along with descriptions of all displays and artifacts currently on display in the museum.
EDSITEment
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A project of the National Endowment for Humanities (NEH), Verizon Thinkfinity, and the National Trust for the Humanities, EDSITEment gathers together original K-12 lesson plans and links to websites and interactive activities from around the web, in the subject areas "Arts and Culture," "Foreign Language," "Literature and Language Arts," and "History and Social Studies."
For U.S. history and social studies teachers, the heart of the site lies in the "Lesson Plans" section. Visitors can browse more than 376 lesson plans, filterable by topic, grade level, or time required to teach. Lesson plans range across all of U.S. history, and include 12 lessons designed to accompany NEH's Picturing America resources and 53 designed for its We the People program. Each plan is divided into three sections: "The Lesson," "The Basics," and "Resources." "The Lesson" lays the lesson out, including an introduction, guiding questions and learning objectives, the lesson's activities, assessment, and ideas for extending the lesson. "The Basics" gives the lesson's suggested grade level, time required, the subject areas it covers, and its authors. "Resources" rounds up required worksheets and primary sources for download.
A valuable resource for teachers looking for ready-to-go lesson plans and guidance around the web.
If these lesson plans aren't enough, visitors can pick the topic "History and Social Studies" on the "Websites" page. Here, visitors can browse short annotated links to more than 219 websites, vetted by humanities specialists. (Unfortunately, this page has no dedicated search function.)
Still not enough? Visitors can also choose the topic "History and Social Studies" on the "Student Resources" page, and browse more than 124 annotated links to interactive and media features from around the web, filterable by grade level and type of resource.
EDSITEment also offers "NEH Connections," describing and linking out to teaching and learning resources funded by NEH, ranging from books and articles to professional development events, a calendar of historical events (clicking on an event links the visitor to lesson plans and other resources related to the event), and "After School" activities—five social studies and culture-related activities that students can carry out in their communities. The "Reference Shelf," under development, currently presents articles on internet browsing and assessing online resources and links to standards.
Visitors can search the entire site by keyword, grade level, subject area, and resource type using the search bar at the top right of the site. They may also sign up for the site newsletter, volunteer to write or revise lesson plans, or nominate websites for inclusion.
Overall, a valuable resource for teachers looking for ready-to-go lesson plans and guidance around the web.
Teaching Holidays
Looking for resources for Constitution Day? EDSITEment collects a roundup of Constitution Day resources, including 11-item bibliography and webographies and links to relevant EDSITEment lesson plans, interactives related to the Constitution, and the full text of the Constitution in English and Spanish. The collection also links to an EDSITEment spotlight on the Constitution, highlighting more resources and providing orientation to the document and to teaching and learning more about it.
EDSITEment also looks at what led up to the creation of the Constitution (and the Articles of Confederation). In its Fourth of July feature, EDSITEment highlights more than 20 lesson plans on African Americans in the 18th and early 19th centuries, colonial protests, the Declaration of Independence, the Founders, religion's place in colonial America, and the Revolutionary War.
Hercules Historical Society
Description
Hercules began as the California Powder Works company town in 1881. Today, Hercules is a thriving suburb. The Hercules Historical Society is dedicated to the preservation of the history of the town.
The society offers periodic tours of the town and community. The website offers a virtual museum, a history of the town, and articles on local history by society members.
Realizing the Value of Primary Sources
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Question
My middle school students prefer to read secondary sources. How can I explain that primary sources are also valuable in understanding historical events?
Answer
What an interesting question! It provokes other questions—what is it about secondary sources that your students like? And what kinds of secondary sources do they like? Textbooks and movies are a familiar genre for students in middle school and offer a much tidier story than reading primary sources. Primary sources, given their variety, seem very different from these; and may offer challenges to your students that they are reluctant to tackle. Consider that primary sources about the same event can directly contradict, that they can contain antiquated or complex prose, and that the background knowledge necessary to understand a primary source can be substantial; and it definitely makes sense that your students balk at using them.
But this complexity, and the need to analyze and read them carefully, is exactly why your students need to work with them.
So what to do? While explaining to your students the value and importance of primary sources is one approach, combining that explanation with a few activities designed to show, rather than tell, students their importance can be invaluable. Some teachers do activities designed to make the nature of history more explicit for their students. These can range from activities that use everyday situations to uncover the existence of multiple contrasting sources about events to those that require students to investigate a historical question by consulting multiple sources. Both kinds of activities can be used to make points about differences and relationships between primary and secondary sources and the necessity of consulting primary sources to understand history.
For example, "everyday" activities could include:
- Students write accounts of the first day of class or school, teacher selects some to read, and then the class discusses why and how they differ. If a school newsletter addressed the beginning of school, use this to introduce secondary accounts into the activity.
- Stage a brief dramatic episode (for example, a verbal altercation) with a colleague and then have students write what happened. Compare accounts, generate questions that need to be asked of the accounts, and then consider how these interact with a hypothetical account of the same from the school newspaper—the secondary account in this activity.
- Read, analyze, and compare conflicting accounts of a community event that you find in the school or local newspaper. Identify what primary sources were consulted and the role they play in the story the newspaper tells.
More historical activities include:
- Do an Opening Up the Textbook lesson where students work with primary sources and their textbook and consider the role each plays in telling the story of the past.
- Use a lesson like the one reviewed here about the Boston Massacre to help students understand that primary sources are the raw materials of history.
- Or try an activity structure like this one for analyzing photographs or this one for writing structured academic controversies to meaningfully engage students with primary sources.
Using detective work as a metaphor for introducing primary sources and the central role they play in creating those secondary accounts can be useful. See this Research Brief or this one for a quick look at studies that included teaching students what primary sources were and how they were used by historians.
You may also get buy-in from your students if you select primary sources that you judge especially interesting for them. For example, try using childrens’ voices from the past (See this Depression Era lesson or this Civil War lesson.) or sources addressing topics they are interested in like music or sports.
But in any case, even if students are initially resistant to primary sources in your classroom, we encourage you to use them and help them learn why studying history without them makes little sense as they are the raw materials of the discipline. Primary sources also offer rich opportunities for helping your students practice and hone their reading and analysis skills, critical abilities for their future.
Liberty, Checks and Balances, and the Constitution, Part One
Description
Idaho State University Political Science Professor David Gray Adler examines what he describes as the great constitutional crisis of the day: the usurpation and abdication of constitutional roles by President and Congress. Building his argument on the concerns of the Framers, Dr. Adler points to the endangerment to liberty posed by the erosion of checks and balances.
Audio and video options are available.
Five Years After 9/11: What Needs to Be Done?
Description
Lowell E. Jacoby, executive vice president for Strategic Intelligence Opportunities at CACI International, discusses what he believes U.S. citizens need to think about and what they need to prepare for in proceeding forward from 9/11.
Video and audio options are available.
Bland County History Archives
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Over more than 15 years, Rocky Gap High School of Rocky Gap, VA, has offered students the opportunity to participate in a history and technology project. While working on the project, students conduct oral history interviews, and archive these interviews and related photographs in a database and, in many cases, online.
The main page can be somewhat difficult to navigate. However, the largest portion of content can be found under Stories of the People. This section contains roughly 90 oral history transcripts on the lives of Bland County residents. Topics range from train rides and farm life to working in a World War II aircraft factory and religious practices. Some of the transcripts are also accompanied by photographs of the interviewee throughout his or her life.
Yet other transcripts link to collection pages which bring together related oral histories, as well as narration written by students. In some cases, video and audio versions are available in addition to the text transcripts. Topics include the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), church, death practices, farming, logging, the railroad, school life, tunnel building, and Bland County residents at war.
For more information on the project and its facilities, try the links under "Mountain Home Project."
This website is excellent as inspiration for beginning your own local history projects, as well as a fantastic resource for anyone looking for information on life in rural Virginia.
Note: The site is frequently unavailable for short bursts of time. Try again later if you reach a 404 error page.