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.
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.
NBC Nightly News looks back at the Cuban Missile Crisis, showing how close America came to nuclear war with Russia in 1962.
The documentary clip may not appear on the first page.
On the occasion of Eugene McCarthy's death, NBC explores the tumultuous year of 1968, when he challenged the Democrats to focus on Vietnam, the issue tearing the country apart.
This feature is no longer available.
The granddaughter of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg discusses a documentary she has created for HBO that explores the question of whether they were really guilty.
The Nevada State Railroad Museum is located in Boulder City, Nevada, the city that built the Hoover Dam. The museum chronicles the history of rail travel in Nevada, dating back to the 1930s.
The museum offers train rides, field trip programs, exhibits on railroad history, and the "engineer for an hour" program. The website offers basic visitor information.
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.
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.
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?
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!
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.
The Museum displays artifacts relating to the history of fire fighting on the Comstock and in Nevada.
The museum offers exhibits.
This site focuses on an abrupt change in U.S. policy toward Cuba in 1963. The site includes an audio file of a conversation (3.5 minutes) between Kennedy and his national Security Advisor, McGeorge Bundy, that took place 17 days before Kennedy was assassinated. Kennedy and Bundy discussed taking a softer approach toward Fidel Castro and Cuba, and Kennedy agreed to have secret talks with Castro under the right circumstances. Castro claimed to be open to the idea as well.
The site includes several other supporting items, including eight recently declassified top-secret documents and memoranda supporting and setting up talks between Kennedy and Castro.
The documents indicate that Kennedy saw little advantage in continuing the hard line stance of the U.S. against Castro and Cuba, and believed that a softer approach held strategic value in normalizing relations between the two countries. The papers make it equally clear that Kennedy's successor, Lyndon Johnson, retracted Kennedy's offer.
This site offers three CIA briefing papers and a transcript of a message from Castro to Kennedy. A mini-scorecard allows visitors to track the key figures in the talks. This site allows researchers, students, and teachers access to previously unavailable material, and would be a useful resource for Cold War studies.
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.