Professor Jules Tygiel reviews the life of Jackie Robinson and his relationship to and support of the Civil Rights Movement. Tygiel focuses not on Robinson's life as a baseball player, but on his wider cultural and social impact.
In this Library of Congress presentation, the children of author and civil rights activist M. Carl Holman—Kinshasha Holman-Conwill, Kwasi Holman, and Kwame Holman—reflect on the character of their father, who also served as the director of the National Urban Coalition.
Distinguished historian and lifelong civil rights activist Professor John Hope Franklin joins archivist Allen Weinstein and Dr. Lonnie Bunch, director of the new National Museum of African-American History and Culture, to discuss his careers as educator, scholar, and activist.
To watch this interview, scroll to "John Hope Franklin," and select "Watch the Video."
This student think-aloud shows a 99-second video of a student reading a Social Security poster and congressional testimony by a NAACP representative. The student reads the poster out loud, generating a question as she reads. Rather than spending time hypothesizing answers, the student reads the next document, which helps her answer her original question, and raises other questions about the significance of race and class in the fashioning of Social Security legislation.
This example of intertextual reading reveals a student capable of reading documents using and comparing multiple documents to help her answer historical questions. The accompanying text commentary explains what the student is doing and how teachers can support students in intertextual reading. The documents she interprets may be downloaded here.
Four guided investigations designed to teach students how to read primary sources and construct historical narratives lie at the heart of this website. Topics are: the Spanish-American War, the Scopes Trial, Social Security, and Rosa Parks. Each topic includes a short introductory video, a timeline of events, a central question, and extension activities. For example, the Rosa Parks investigation poses the question: "Why did the boycott of Montgomery's buses succeed?"
After completing a simple login, students read annotated documents—including letters written by the boycott organizers, a speech by Martin Luther King, Jr. and an interview with a woman working in Montgomery—and answer guiding questions, and draw on their responses to answer the question. The website also includes a useful introduction to the idea of historical thinking.
According to the Library of Congress Webcasts summary, in this video, "Joseph Kip Kosek, assistant professor at George Washington University, discussed the impact of radical Christian pacifists on American democratic theory and practice, at the Library of Congress. Kosek, the author of Acts of Conscience: Christian Nonviolence and Modern American Democracy and a former fellow of the Library's John W. Kluge Center, talked about his book. According to Kosek, in response to the massive bloodshed that defined the 20th century, American religious radicals developed an effective new form of nonviolent protest, one that combined Christian principles with new uses of mass media. Greatly influenced by the ideas of Mohandas K. Gandhi, these 'acts of conscience' included sit-ins, boycotts, labor strikes and conscientious objection to war. Beginning with World War I and ending with the ascendance of Martin Luther King Jr., Kosek traces the impact of radical Christian pacifists on America."
My 8th-grade students will interview a veteran and then do independent research on those battles and locations. Do you have suggestions of sites my
students can hit that would have info about the various branches of military and info about battles, ships, planes, etc. where these vets served?
There are a number of wonderful sites for someone looking for background information about World War II, and the experiences of military men and women abroad and at home. Unfortunately, while there is considerable general information, the experiences of specific veterans can be widely varied—extending across the globe, and over land, sea, and air. Given the large number of units and the many changes in deployments over the course of the war, it can be difficult to find information about specific units on the web.
As a starting point, to transport your students back into the period you might start with some of the very broad overviews of the war by sites such as the History Channel. And (with proper warnings about the way they exaggerate and oversimplify) you might have them look at one of the War Department’s Why We Fight documentaries.
As they try to get a closer understanding of the specific experiences of particular service people and their units, your students can look at the materials prepared by the military services, which have substantial resources on the web (though they are a pretty clunky). For information on ground forces, they should check out the Army’s U.S. Center for Military History. Much of the material here consists of digitized version of print publication (hence the rather look), but it provides very comprehensive information about particular events.
The Naval History Center offers similar information for the U.S. Navy and Marine corps. Those are probably your best sources for information on the web at the unit level.
The National Archives also offers a treasure trove of information digitized from their collections, which includes everything from enlistment records of particular soldiers to photographs from the period. It can be hit-or-miss the closer you try to get to a specific person or unit, but it does provide some excellent examples of their specific experiences at the time.
Finally, the Library of Congress’s Veteran’s History Project provides a model of the kinds of information students might want to gather from each of the veterans they interview. Each interviewee in the database has a small fact sheet summarizing the key elements of their careers, and also offers digitized recordings of interviews with service men and women.
These are the best sources of information about World War II I have found on the web, though there are dozens of other sources available out there of widely varied quality. Most of the other sites are either extremely dated or are quite general summaries of broad themes and specific battles or events, but these sites should get your students started and on the right track.
From C-SPAN's Video Library:
"Historian Harry Butowsky discussed 'The Mystery of Radar in Hawaii.' In 1941 radar was a new technology that was being utilized at Pearl Harbor, but the infrastructure surrounding its monitoring was not fully developed. Mr. Butowsky used many slides while telling the December 7, 1941, story from the point that the Japanese planes were detected on radar to the ongoing discussion of assigning blame for the success of the surprise attack."
CBS's The Early Show draws parallels between 9/11 and Pearl Harbor in this short video clip filmed for the 10th anniversary of 9/11, which uses interviews with two eyewitnesses.
I'm doing research on the movie Memphis Belle and how historically accurate it is. Can you tell me what the Memphis Belle’s last mission was, because I keep finding conflicting information about it.
The Memphis Belle was the nickname of a U.S. Army Air Force Boeing B-17F that flew strategic bombing missions from England into continental Europe. As part of the 324th Bomb Squadron of the 91st Bomb Group, the plane flew 25 operational missions between November 1942 and May 1943, returning from all missions with its crew intact.
Most of the plane’s missions were flown by the same crew, but a few were not. Conversely, the plane’s usual crew, headed by Captain Robert K. Morgan, flew several missions in other B-17s. According to the 324th Bomber Squadron mission reports, the plane’s usual crew flew their 25th mission on May 17th, 1943, piloting the Memphis Belle to the Keroman submarine base, located in the Breton city of Lorient. There they bombed a platform used to pull U-boats out of the water. However, the aircraft itself did not complete its 25th mission until its next flight. That flight, manned by a different crew than its usual one, occurred on May 19th and sent the Memphis Belle to the Kilian submarine pen and bunker at Kiel, Germany. Its mission was to bomb an engineering and turbine engine workshop.
So, the 25th mission of the crew occurred two days before the 25th mission of the aircraft, which may account for some of the confusion about the “last mission.” After both crew and plane completed their respective 25th mission, the crew received the Air Medal with three Oak Leaf Clusters and the Distinguished Flying Cross. They were then ordered in June to fly the Memphis Belle back to the United States for a cross-country tour, the aim of which was to increase morale back home and to sell War Bonds.
The commanders who directed the bombing raids on Europe had decided to limit a crew’s tour of duty to 25 missions in order to increase morale among the crews: Casualty rates at the beginning of the missions approached 80% and when the Memphis Belle completed its tour (the first heavy bomber to do so), it was a joyful event, not only for the crew, but also for the entire air command and the American public.
To mark the event, American filmmaker William Wyler (then a Major in the U.S. Army Air Force) filmed and produced a 1944 documentary for the War Department entitled Memphis Belle: A Story of a Flying Fortress. In 1990, Wyler’s daughter Catherine produced a fictionalized movie of the plane’s 25th operational mission, entitled Memphis Belle.
Life. "WWII: Allied bombers and Crews." 2011. Slideshow featuring photos from World War II.
Wyler, William. "Memphis Belle: A Story of a Flying Fortress". First Motion Picture Unit of the U.S. Army Air Corps. Paramount Pictures, Inc. 1944. Found in the right-hand navigation bar of WWII Reels.
U.S Air Force. "B-17 Flying Fortress." 2004.
91st Bomb Group. "Dailies of the 323rd Squadron." Accessed August 2011.
Richard G. Davis, Bombing the European Axis Powers. A Historical Digest of the Combined Bomber Offensive 1939–1945. Maxwell Air Force Base, AL: Air University Press, 2006.