The Bracero History Archive—a collaborative project of George Mason University, the Smithsonian, Brown University, and the University of Texas, El Paso—is an online collection of resources that documents the Bracero program, a guest worker initiative where millions of Mexicans came to work in American agriculture during the mid-20th century.
Hispano Music & Culture of the Northern Rio Grande, housed at the Library of Congress’s digital archive America Memory, is a collection of religious and secular music of Spanish-speaking residents of rural Northern New Mexico and Southern Colorado.
The Electronic Schoolhouse / La Escuela Electrónica is a bilingual educational resource of historical resources developed by the New York State Archives, a program of the New York Department of Education that cares for and provides access to more than 200 million documents.
America's Heritage: An Adventure in Liberty is a curriculum designed to teach students about the roots of our heritage and the responsibilities of American citizenship. The elementary-level plans in this curriculum are presented in both Spanish and English for English language learners.
The World Digital Library, a collaborative project of the Library of Congress, UNESCO, and other partners, is a collection of primary documents from around the world. Particularly useful for working with ELL students, the site has a drop-down language menu, which allows teachers to translate the site’s accompanying materials into a number of languages including Spanish and Chinese.
Graphic organizers can be effective scaffolds for all history students, but they can be especially helpful for students with limited English proficiency. They allow these students to engage with difficult historical concepts without depending completely upon academic language to convey information.
Graphic organizers are visual tools that allow students to clarify key concepts and understand the relationship between them.
Finding creative ways to include English Language Learners in classroom activities can be challenging regardless of the teacher’s dedication. One activity that I have found to be successful with all of my students, including those with limited English proficiency, is a primary source analysis activity.
This activity can be used in relation to any topic of study. Follow these steps:
Have the tools of new media discovered anything new which resulted in revisions? Have the tools uncovered new information that has changed historical views? Have the tools been used to manipulate the truth so a view of reality has changed? Where would I find such information?
New media tools are slowly and subtly changing the way we do history, by providing new ways of seeing the past and sharing those insights with others. At the moment, the new media tools that seem to hold the most promise for scholarly revisions are the ones that support visualization of historical records and tools that support mass assessment of textual materials.
Some of the possibilities in these new forms of visualization can be seen in the article "The Differences Slavery Made" by William Thomas and Ed Ayers, which used Geographic Information Systems to plot relationships between different groups in the Shenandoah Valley. This is one of the most visible cases where new mapping technologies provided opportunities to see the past in new ways, but this sort of work is beginning to appear in numerous printed works, as well. Franco Morreti and others are developing similar techniques to peer into large masses of textual data.
The challenge for the discipline may lie in creating new forms of presentation to match up with the insights that new media tools can provide. A number of innovative new media projects have been published over the past decade, but they tend to either look and feel like traditional printed books or are primarily collections of original source materials. Unfortunately, the current state of web technologies seems much better at serving out information as fairly static text or as databases.
Nevertheless, many of the book-like projects can pair innovative analyses with deep archives of visual materials (see for instance Helena Pohlandt McCormick's 'I Saw a Nightmare…' Doing Violence to Memory: The Soweto Uprising, June 16, 1976). And conversely, many of the digital collection projects are shaped by significant interpretations in the way the materials are gathered and presented (see for instance the Center for History and New Media's Gulag: Many Days, Many Lives).
Digital collections tend to receive less recognition as scholarship, but they hearken back to an earlier time in the history discipline, when the gathering and organization of primary source materials was considered a valued part of scholarly work. At the same time, they point forward to a future when the insights of new media can be presented in ways that match and truly convey their significance.
Cohen, Daniel J and Roy Rosenzweig. Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2006.
Knowles, Anne Kelly and Amy Hillier, eds. Placing History: How Maps, Spatial Data, and GIS Are Changing Historical Scholarship. Redlands, CA: ESRI, Inc., 2008.
Moretti, Franco. Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History. London: Verso, 2005.
Scheinfeldt, Tom. "Where’s the Beef? Does Digital Humanities Have to Answer Questions?" Found History (12 May 2010).
Seefeldt, Douglas and William G. Thomas. “What is Digital History? A Look at Some Exemplar Projects.” Perspectives on History (May 2009).
Access 7 activities which introduce the evidentiary and narrative aspects of history to young students. Students familiarize themselves with these topics by exploring their own past school experiences.
This collection of activities found on the Bringing History Home website introduces first graders to important historical concepts. Through exploring the history of their time at school, students learn about topics such as chronology and historical context as well as how to identify and question different types of primary sources. While these concepts may seem fairly sophisticated for first or second graders, the activities introduce them in accessible and engaging ways. There are seven activities that make up this instructional unit. Each activity can stand alone as a single class lesson or can be combined with others for a multi-day lesson or unit. The first activity asks the question, "What is history," and distinguishes between fictional stories and stories about things that actually happened. Understanding history as a story is a central theme throughout the plan, and the subsequent activities focus on the centrality of evidence in creating historical stories.
Activities three, four, and five introduce students to various types of evidence historians use to make sense of the past, through examining school artifacts such as a newsletter and cafeteria menu. In the final activity, students work as a class to construct a mind map about the history of their year at school. Students are then asked to draw a picture that illustrates one of the concepts from the mind map. Finally, students can be assessed by asking them to identify types of evidence that can provide particular types of information about the school. With a focus on making connections to students' experiences and teaching them that history is a story based on evidence, these clear and kid-friendly activities are an elegant way to introduce key aspects of history to young elementary students. Designed for first graders, these activities can be useful for both younger and older students.
Yes
Introduces students to core characteristics of the historical discipline.
Yes
Yes
However, teachers must find text-based artifacts about their school (e.g. a newsletter) to use in the lesson.
Yes
Students are asked to analyze multiple pieces of evidence in order to construct a history of their time at school.
Yes
Students are introduced to sourcing and are asked to consider source information in several activities. See this example. Questions are used to demonstrate the close reading of multiple kinds of sources.
Yes
A very accessible introduction to the idea that history is more than just a set of facts.
Yes
Yes
Includes an assessment activity and rubric.
Yes, but no estimated times are provided for instruction.
A few activities rely on specific texts but substitute texts can be used.
Yes