Colonial Children's Dance
Description
Kelly McEvoy, Colonial Williamsburg peer teacher in the volunteer dance department, describes the social importance of dancing in colonial society, and the education of children in dance.
Teacher Institute
Description
Director of Teacher Development Tab Broyles describes Colonial Williamsburg's Teacher Institutes and their emphasis on introducing educators to using primary sources in the classroom.
The Bray School
Description
Headmistress Ann Wager taught at the Bray School in Williamsburg, VA, from 1760 to 1774, educating enslaved children. Interpreter Antoinette Brennan shares details from Wager's life and describes the school and its operations.
A Splendid Coincidence
Description
Inspiration intersects with means in a partnership that resurrects a city. Character interpreter Ed Way discusses W.A.R. Goodwin, founder of Colonial Williamsburg.
Elgin Schoolhouse State Historic Site [NV]
Description
The Elgin Schoolhouse is a historic school in rural Nevada's Lincoln County. The schoolhouse was used from 1922 through 1967, when its last student reached eighth grade. Today, the Elgin Schoolhouse State Historic Site features half of the house's original items. The rest are authentic to the time period.
The site offers exhibits and tours.
Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands
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Annotation
This website offers more than 50,000 slides and photographs that document the history of the American period in Micronesia from 1947 to 1988. The image collection can be browsed or the visitor can sample the types of images in the collection through 12 short animated image tours. The topics of the image tours give an idea of the variety of images available in the collection: parades, dancing, voting, agriculture, stone money, canoes, architecture, women, leaders, education and children, health and hospitals, and men. The only search capability on the site is a Google search of the photograph description files. Additional resources include a map of Oceania and a link to the Hawaii War Records Archive. This archive is a useful source of images for those researching, writing, or teaching the cultural history of the Pacific Islands.
The History Box
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Annotation
A gateway and an archive of numerous articles on New York history, this site "focuses a particularly long lens on the early history of political and economic events, panics, riots and other related matters affecting or contributing to New York City's development and growth." Its main feature is the New York state and New York City directories. (The U.S. directory is currently unavailable.) The New York state directory offers more than 700 links and more than 60 articles organized under 21 topics that include the arts, cities and counties, ethnic groups, military, societies and associations, transportation, women and their professions, and worship.
The New York City directory offers more than 5,200 links and more than 700 articles organized under 58 topics that include architecture, the arts, business matters, city government, clubs and societies, crime and punishment, education, ethnic groups, 5th Avenue, Harlem, immigration, New York City panics, real estate, temperance and prohibition, and Wall Street. The visitor can search the entire site or each directory by keyword. This site is a good starting point for researching the history of New York. It should also be useful for literary scholars, writers, and historical societies.
Online Archive of California
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Annotation
This archive provides more than 81,000 images and 1,000 texts on the history and culture of California. Images may be searched by keyword or browsed according to six categories: history, nature, people, places, society, and technology. Topics include exploration, Native Americans, gold rushes, and California events.
Three collections of texts are also available. Japanese American Relocation Digital Archive furnishes 309 documents and 67 oral histories. Free Speech Movement: Student Protest, U.C. Berkeley, 19641965 provides 541 documents, including books, letters, press releases, oral histories, photographs, and trial transcripts.
UC Berkeley Regional Oral History Office offers full-text transcripts of 139 interviews organized into 14 topics including agriculture, arts, California government, society and family life, wine industry, disability rights, Earl Warren, Jewish community leaders, medicine (including AIDS), suffragists, and UC Black alumni.
Researching for a Research Topic
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Question
I am searching for an unique topic for the National History Day 2010-2011. The theme is "Debate and Diplomacy In History: Successes, Failures, Consequences". We have to choose a topic that reflects that theme, however, we can choose if we want an event that has to do with diplomacy or debate. So, I was wondering if there is a way diplomacy and the concept of spies is related. Is there any event in specific having to do with spies and diplomacy that can relate to the theme? Thank You!
Answer
Kudos on getting started on your NHD project. You ask a specific question about whether diplomacy and spies are related, and the shortest answer is yes, indeed, there are many events and issues you could explore that connect to both of these subjects. But before I get specific, let me share some approaches to finding those topics.
Choosing a topic for historical research can be a lengthier process that we expect. While you’ve done the key initial step of identifying a personal interest that connects to the theme, below are some tips to help you answer your own question.
Background Reading
Do some background reading on Spies and Diplomacy. You can start with something as simple as an encyclopedia or Wikipedia entry. Look for references to events, issues and people that you find intriguing or puzzling. Take notes on those specifics.
Using primary sources and secondary sources truly allows you to engage in historical research
As you do this background reading, also look for sources that are cited in the footnotes, bibliography, or “further reading” sections that look interesting or that you can find easily. You will want to read multiple accounts and overviews on these topics to get a more full range of the possibilities for specific topics.
The Importance of Questions
Ultimately, your project, given that is a historical research project, will answer a question. A good research question both bounds and guides your investigation. Indeed, questions are key to all your tasks—while doing background reading, record questions you have. Look for information that seems incomplete or unexpected. Ask yourself, what do you want to know more about?
Use your questions to help you look into a topic more deeply and extensively. Ultimately, you will need to revise and craft your question so it is neither too broad nor too narrow. But this will not happen in a day. Learning more about the topic will help you finalize your question.
Available Sources
One thing you will have to figure out is: are there sources available and accessible that address this topic and question? Remember you can’t do a project on a topic that has no available sources!
You will want to use a variety of sources, including texts, photos, and so on. Using primary and secondary sources truly allows you to engage in historical research, as you investigate the voices of the past while learning about how previous historians have made sense of them. And to do this, you will have to go beyond google and explore archives and library holdings. This may sound daunting, but at the end of this answer are some resources that can help.
Next Steps
So practically, after you do some background reading, your next steps could be:
Start with three specific topics (an event or person) or questions to explore and for each, ask the following four questions:
1. Is it interesting?
2. Are there sources on it?
3. Is there a problem or mystery that can be investigated?
4. What have historians already found out about it?
Spend at most a few hours on each topic. In that time, you will hopefully get a sense of whether there is an interesting question and available sources for that topic. (You will find this out by reading more and looking for sources, both on and off line.) Then eliminate two of the three. But be forewarned, you may also discover a different person, event, or question that you find more interesting and manageable for your project. Be prepared for that possibility. Better to change topic in the early stages, than stick unnecessarily with a dull or overly difficult one because you feel you have to.
A Recursive Process
One thing to keep in mind throughout your research is that it is an iterative process. As you read more about spies, you encounter more options for topics. As you search for sources about a specific topic (for example, French Spy in 1775, Julien-Alexandre Achard de Bonvouloir), you will have additional questions. At some point, you will need to finalize your topic and question, but in these early stages, be open to changing and tweaking them. And while your topic will become more fixed as you proceed, you may find that the question you answer continues to be refined for months to come as you learn what the sources reveal.
Remember, researching the past is a complex process, these tips only scratch the surface
Finally, remember that espionage is a secret enterprise. If you pick a less current topic, you may find that more sources are available.
Good Luck!
For more information
Here are some other resources that may help you think through the process:
- Historian William Cronon’s helpful site. Especially helpful for choosing a topic is the section titled “asking good questions.”
- National History Day’s Eight Steps of Historical Research. Steps 2, 3, and 4 are most relevant to your question.
- Local resources including school and local librarians, professors, teachers, museums, and historical societies. Use the search function at our "Content” page to find local museums and historical sites (scroll down and look in the right column).
Places you may want to browse to do some background reading and look for topics specific to spies include:
- The International Spy Museum website: Spend some time with the “From Spy” and “exhibits” sections to find ideas for topics.
- The National Security Archives: Browse the electronic briefing books for topic ideas. This list includes a variety of topics with accompanying sources, although they can be difficult to read. Also read about the Freedom of Information Act here—one major tool for finding out about espionage after the fact.
- Use keywords (e.g., spy, diplomacy) in the History Content Gateway search function and explore some of those results.
The Indian War of 1812
Description
Professor David Henkin examines the ongoing war between Native American nations and the United States in 1812 and prior to and following 1812. He also considers popular memory of Native American history and failure to integrate it into U.S. history as a whole.