Teaching Teachers Using Primary Sources

Video Overview

David Jaffee details his thoughts on using visual primary sources in teaching, including the importance of establishing the original context of images.

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Teaching Teachers Using Primary Sources
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We were working now on the New York City draft riots. I was asked to do some work with visual materials, which is the area that I'm probably most interested in, in thinking about teaching at every level. And so I went, you know, and looked for some materials, and I looked in various books on the draft riots and what was out on the web, and it wasn't hard to find materials.

What I railed against, of course, is the lack of context.

There were materials from Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, from Harper's. But I had the really interesting sort of research problem of, "Well, here are these images." What I railed against, of course, is the lack of context. These images appeared in illustrated newspapers and journals with articles, with text, which surrounded it and contextualized it, which framed how the readers would view it because they wouldn't just look at the pictures the way we do. Sort of a similar experience to when we look at a Louis Hine photograph on a wall but forget that it was actually maybe part of a poster or a newspaper article that very much framed how someone in a progressive era would have seen that, and this is a really valuable lesson.

Context Reinstates the Humanity in History

I went to one of the online databases, HarpWeek, as well as Frank Leslie's database. I had some Frank Leslie material, and sort of gave the teachers the next day after I'd done my little research, a few of the articles and images together. And they were just really bowled over. They got my point immediately that, oh, here's another. And they made—second, they really found these really interesting juxtapositions. One article on the draft riots had, one teacher pointed out, a little squib in the corner of the page where it was announced that the social season was beginning in Newport. All these various politicians had gone off to Newport, and it was very odd, obviously, to think that while this sort of blood bath was going on in the streets of New York City, the social season was beginning in Newport and these, you know, politicians and other dignitaries had gone off to start the season. And they, of course, realized, you know, their students would be immensely interested.

So, again, it was sort of careful reading. It was careful viewing, and it was research. And they again rushed past me, the teachers I was involving in this discussion, to say, "Oh, I could do this as a research project." My students could sort of take this instead of what I did, what I found interesting, I could really turn it around and ask them to go dig in that database and come back with little things.

Again, I think one of the great dilemmas with now that we keep talking about using images is we forget that we really want them grounded as well with text, and that's how, often, they appear.

Working with K-3 Teachers

Video Overview

Give K-3 teachers as much attention as higher elementary and secondary teachers, say Alice Reilly and Cynthia Szwajkowski. Often overlooked in TAH Grant projects, K-3 teachers must apply U.S. history knowledge differently in classrooms and need teaching strategies tailored to them.

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Alice: One of the reasons why we chose K-3 is because we feel that they are a very underserved group. While we live in the suburbs of Washington and have access to lots of institutions that offer professional development, most of these programs are geared towards secondary teachers. And so the K-3 people are required to teach history in their classrooms because of our state standards and requirements, yet they are generalists, they do not have the background knowledge, and they really don't have access to targeted professional development.

This is a group that had extraordinary enthusiasm for what we were doing because they sense that need in their classrooms.

Cynthia: They were very easily recruited, and then turned around and quickly recruited other teachers. So, this is a group that had extraordinary enthusiasm for what we were doing because they sense that need in their classrooms.

Alice: We did have elementary teachers in our previous grants, and while it was, again, the focus was content, we felt that some of our elementary teachers were intimidated by the content knowledge base of our secondary teachers, who could at times be very intense and passionate about history. And so we decided that as an underserved group, it would be easier to really address their background needs and get them comfortable with the history content, to give them the confidence to be able to do some interesting, engaging, creative ways of instruction.

Cynthia: They read three books during our one-year TAH program, but over the course of the years, they've come back to me with volumes and volumes that they've read.

Alice: And then that enthusiasm that was developed comes across in their instruction, runs over into the kids.

And another unintended consequence of this also was the kids going home and telling their parents. Because at the primary level, parents are always asking, "What did you do in school today? What did you learn?"

And another unintended consequence of this also was the kids going home and telling their parents. Because at the primary level, parents are always asking, "What did you do in school today? What did you learn?" And the kids were just bubbling about what had happened in school and what they had done in history class and learned about it. And with our large ELL population, these are parents that do not have a background in American history, and so the parents are also learning from the kids. And of course, that motivates the kids more because their parents are interested. So, it was a very nice unintended consequence.

Cynthia: A lot of our K-3 classrooms are covered with little stickies because wherever, you know, Eleanor Roosevelt is up in the classroom, kids come back with little stickies of what they've Googled about Eleanor Roosevelt and stuck up on the wall. So, there's evidence everywhere of the enthusiasm and the sort of taking root of history that's happening outside of the classroom. And they are pulling their parents along with it, too, according—at least anecdotally—to our teachers.

Cynthia: We have a one-week Summer Institute, and it has to do a lot with our emphasis on working with teachers to emphasize object learning, to emphasize the use of primary documents or photographs or, you know, anything that small children can really get their hands on. Using time and place, location, and—

Alice: Biographies.

Cynthia: And biographies.

We spend one day at Gunston Hall learning about the Constitution, learning about a lot of American historical figures, and as heroes and what their heroic attributes are along with their humanity. And then we spend a day at various Smithsonian Museums. We've had a wonderful experience at the Postal Museum, at the National Museum of American History, at the Portrait Gallery, at American Art.

And then the last day we have spent at Mount Vernon, primarily focused on George Washington. And that has turned into a really special day because there's obviously a large number of wonderful historical scholars on the subject of Washington. But so many now have become very comfortable in using place, you know, using the mansion and the grounds to talk about Washington as a farmer and as a recorder and as a hero during the war, a leader that walked away from power.

Scholarship in one massive lesson can be brought to bear on math, on language arts, on social studies . . .

So we've got scholarly discussions going on after tours. And then, finally, we've brought in some experts in primary education that take those George Washington lessons and bring teachers down around the floor creating maps on, you know, a shower curtain, and doing mathematical exercises coming out of the lessons of where Washington's armies were, etc., etc. So, really, cross-curricular work in showing how that scholarship in one massive lesson can be brought to bear on math, on language arts, on social studies, and so on and so forth. And then we follow that up during the school year with two full-day academic experiences like that. One of them we do at the National Museum of American Indian because they study the various Native cultures.

And another one where we work with them full-day in one of our high schools in their theater department with their theater coaches and sometimes their kids, to teach the teachers how to become those, to become Martha Washington instead of talking about Martha Washington, so that every day is kind of an exciting theatrical production in a first-grade classroom. And then there are two book talks, which happen after school, a three-hour period, where they sit down with a scholar and discuss the books that they've read.

Alice: So, the content and the teaching of historical thinking is done through really four different strands. Biographies, because so many of them are emphasized in our state-required curriculum. Object-based learning, because many of these primary kids we recognize can't read, but yet visually are able to think historically. Teaching history through time and place, and we recognize that that whole idea of time and sequencing and chronological order is probably the hardest thing to teach primary kids, but using it in a way that makes it engaging and motivating. And then the fourth one is to teach history through art, music, and drama. And that's the content that we base this whole module for the K-3 folks on.

Cynthia: We've been really happy with the fact that people who start this program finish it. We have very little absenteeism, and so, in other words, the load is not too heavy, but certainly they walk away with a lot of materials and a lot of ideas and a lot of scholarship.

Alice: And the expectation is for teachers to attend, obviously, all of these sessions and participate, participate in our rigorous evaluation program, which we have, as well as to produce a lesson plan using some of the content that they have learned and a primary source. These lesson plans are then posted on our local Blackboard site for our teachers to share, and so they can then see the implementation of it.

Cynthia: And I think it's important to note that on our pre- and post-evaluations of teachers and kids in this program, we saw by far the greatest gain amongst our K-3 teachers because, admittedly, they didn't have that background, so they tend to learn very quickly.

It's that pedagogy and the historical thinking, "Well, if they can do that in second grade, I can do that in third grade," or "I can do that in fourth grade."

Alice: Within a school, it's, even though other teachers may be—other grade levels may be teaching different content, it's that pedagogy and the historical thinking, "Well, if they can do that in second grade, I can do that in third grade," or "I can do that in fourth grade." And the kids are starting to demand it too because the kids are starting to say, "Well, last year we did such and such," and so we're starting to see that ripple effect as well, which is really neat to see. And the confidence level of the teachers, because they can go beyond what our state document requires, which is pretty detailed in terms of content.

And really, to me, putting the story back in history, and we all know that given the story and the relevance of those stories, it can be much more motivating and engaging for kids.

Cynthia: And I have to say to be straight up, they desperately need the resources in those classrooms. There are very few of them. Every time I was out with teachers, they were spending every dime they'd ever earned buying things for their classroom. So, if we were able to give them some of the tools, the objects, recreate colonial games and those kinds of things, teach the letters with a colonial doll in the way that they used to teach them in colonial times. That's something that's deeply appreciated by them, and I think it's a little bit of a give-back to them to give them those tools that they really need.

Alice: So, we gave, as part of the grant, each of these primary teachers received an artifact box with a lot of these objects in it that they would then take back to their classroom.

Frankly kids prefer non-fiction. They want to know it's a true story. They want to know history.

Cynthia: Primary teachers really appreciate the information to go back to their schools to say, "I'm not taking time away from 'No Child Left Behind,' a subject. I am in fact using history to teach literacy. I am teaching reading through non-fiction." And frankly kids prefer non-fiction. They want to know it's a true story. They want to know history.

I didn't have to recruit at all K-3. They recruited each other. They had set up after school specials to pull people in and say, "This is what I got. This is what I did. This is why I loved it." And they were always full, those groups.

Cynthia: One of the most amazing lessons was one that absolutely defies description. A young teacher in the program who was an English as a Second Language teacher, but she was working within a large classroom. So, it was close to 30 second graders, and there was maybe a third of those where English was not their first language. And she was working with small children, young children, and she was working with four important documents. So, she had a relatively large version of the Constitution, next to the Declaration of Independence, next to the Gettysburg Address, next to Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech. And the kids together found language that was consistent across all four documents and highlighted and colored and circled and whatnot, and talked about what those concepts were, and did those concepts mean the same thing at the founding of the nation as they did in the time of Martin Luther King? She then put a couple of those at least, on audio, so an actor was reading the Gettysburg address, and the kids hands would shoot up when they'd hear that familiar vocabulary. And then she did the Martin Luther King speech similarly, although in his words this time.

It was utterly inspiring. I think many people would think it was too much to do in an 11th-grade classroom.

She had visual pieces where she had portraiture from the Portrait Gallery that she had cut up into pieces so that the kids had to put those back together as a puzzle. And then they came back together again and discussed what those documents meant, what that language meant, and critical thinking exercises ensued about change over time and what this nation really stands for and has tried to stand for over time. So, it was utterly inspiring. I think many people would think it was too much to do in an 11th-grade classroom. Never true, but really well accomplished in a second-grade classroom.

Picturing America in New York

Video Overview

NEH's Picturing America gave out reproductions of selected history-related artwork to schools across the U.S. Brian Carlin and Philip Panaritis of New York describe how Picturing America can be expanded upon to lead students and educators into analyzing the artwork closely and examining its context.

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Brian Carlin: Picturing America is a project by the National Endowment for the Humanities. What it was it's a resource kit, but it's beyond the regular curriculum kit. It's not a little box, it's huge. 20x30 size posters of 40 iconic images in American History from the Revolution to the present day era. It was an open call for schools and districts to apply and every school could apply for it. And our—in New York City, every school got one—every public school in New York City got one. So we developed, along with the city, lessons using the images and looking at art in general and tailored it to classroom use—elementary, middle, and high school.

Philip Panaritis: We've been able to use those images both in our training and TAH sessions. Also we sponsored after-school workshops for teachers. How are we using it? First it was a question of go find it, because teachers would say, "Oh, we didn't get that!" but of course they did. Sometimes it was in a storage closet or it was decorating the principal's office. So the first step in using Picturing America has been to go get it. The images are front and back so lots of times they have been displayed in a hallway or permanently, which of course means a teacher can't use them in their classroom, and you also lose the one that's on the reverse.

The first thing that we've had to do is ascertain, "Yes, you have this somewhere, let's see if we can put it in the hands of teachers." Sometimes there's a lot of proprietary notions in a school that come in and someone—it could be the guy on the loading dock, it could be the principal—but someone says, "That goes to the librarian" or "That goes to the art teacher." And, depending on how professionally generous that person is, she or he may share it with other teachers or not, in which case some—and those are the worse cases—but in general we've found that it's a great resource, it's free. The teaching spiral binder that comes with it provides more than adequate [background material]; you don't have to be an art historian to see some of the context of it. And it's been a lot of fun.

Philip Panaritis: We consist of 10 full-day sessions plus two walking tours. One is downtown New York; last year we did the other one uptown in Harlem. There's a series of after-school workshops and book signings by artists and historians that are—those are open to that cohort and all the teachers that are in and have gone through the various grants, which is now hundreds of people in that community.

For the workshop that we just did we put together a slideshow. One of the images in Picturing America is Washington Crossing the Delaware, Emanuel Leutze's giant painting. We gave them all copies on a CD today of the slideshow where we had found 50 different iterations of that image that were used to sell puzzles, sell knives, sell Budweiser beer in 1776[?], sell Las Vegas tourism, all sorts of [uses] from the sacred to the profane. So that was kind of just fun for the teachers and fun for the kids to see. But there's a serious message there, as well, about how images are used to sell things and who owns history and who owns the images and how they can be twisted really in a variety of different ways or manipulated.

Philip Panaritis: The other thing is that the venue for over half the sessions is in New York Historical—or in tje Museum of the City of New York or Brooklyn Museum of Art. With the museum educator we do gallery walks so they actually have—and its nice to live in a big city like that because the point of doing that is for them to see the image in its own [setting]. And usually some of them are huge, they have no idea how big they are, they see details that they couldn't see, even in the Picturing America blow-ups. But secondly that they bring the youngsters back for field trips.

The museum educators and Brian and I try very hard to adopt and to model a rigorous method of looking at images, whether it's a photograph, or sometimes we use the quadrant where you have a piece of paper and you're only going to move it and look at this. And that's good for kids, and good for teachers too, because their eyes are naturally drawn to the central figure usually and we tend to jump to conclusions without looking carefully. So what do you see? Then what does it mean? Then what is the evidence for that, defend your conclusion. One of the things that is nice about art, unlike other aspects of teaching history, it seems to lend itself to talking about feelings. And what do you see in that migrant mother in Dorothea Lange's picture? And what is the evidence that you see shame or pride or desperation, specifically talk about how the photograph shows that or the painting.

So that's a lot of fun, what does it mean, and then one of the questions, and we work with good historians and good art historians who know that one of the things that even in their field is what don't we know? And so it isn't like, here's all the answers I'm going to pour into your head, but if it's really a good historian or a good art history person then they talk about things that are unknown, that there's two or three or four different schools of thought about, that it's possible he posed it that way because. . . ? And what do you think?

Brian Carlin: We don't just take the teachers to the museum and say, "Oh, it's great we're increasing their content knowledge." We're increasing their content knowledge, we're building their pedogogy, but now we're bringing them to a place they can bring their students to. That's their local institutions, they're really good institutions, and they've got the training to do it and now they go there and it brings it all together nicely. From the professors and Phil and I, to the museum educators, to the teachers, and all the way down to the students.

Interactivity

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This classroom tool—one of several history “interactives” on the Annenberg Media website—focuses on what a primary source is. Designed for students to work through either individually or in groups, this online resource is designed to help students read different kinds of primary sources for clues about their historical context. Using newspapers, journals, letters, and speeches, the site challenges students to test their document-reading abilities in an online game.

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Interactivities

Ron Gorr's Trifecta: Primary Sources, Technology, and Student Interaction in One Activity!

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Finding Room for 21st-century Teaching

As an A.P. U.S. history teacher, I often struggle to balance my desire/need to teach content with the seemingly endless changes to national and state standards, administrative expectations, current trends in education, and 21st-century learning, but by gosh. . . . I think I found an activity that will work.

Motivated by my gig as Teacher Representative for Teachinghistory.org, I tried to design a lesson that might accomplish multiple goals in one fell swoop, while also fitting into my current curriculum. In this case, I focused my energy on the Jacksonian Period, which is a unit that we traditionally fly though very quickly. My hope was that I could keep the pace of the course moving, but still allow the students an opportunity to experience a more contextual connection with the subject.

In 2010, I presented this activity with Jennifer Rosenfeld (Outreach Director for Teachinghistory.org) at the National Council for Social Studies Conference in Denver, CO. My specific objectives for this assignment were:

  1. Require students to use Teachinghistory.org to locate primary sources applicable to a specific period of history
  2. Read, analyze, and share those primary sources with their classmates (and me) by posting the information on a Wiki
  3. Engage in an online discussion about their sources
  4. Provide students a better contextual understanding of the historical period (in this case, the Jacksonian Period, 1824–1839)
  5. Complete entire project within a week in association with online chapter tests and in-class discussion

I think it is important to note that my objectives DID NOT include a stringent Primary Source Analysis component. I wanted the students to make their own assumptions and assessment of the sources versus focusing their attention on a worksheet. (However, If you feel more comfortable placing more emphasis on the formal analysis of primary sources, the National Archives has a fantastic set of primary source evaluators.)

Step One: Introduction to the Technology

The foundations for this project actually started earlier in the year with simple searches of the Teachinghistory.org site and one practice Wiki discussion surrounding electoral politics. But, for those of you who have never done a Wiki, blog, or other type of online discussion board, don't freak out. They are very user-friendly and odds are, the kids have already taken part in one. I prefer PBWorks, but there are many to choose from. See if your school or colleagues have a favorite.

I also spent some time going over online discussion norms. See the main page of my Wiki!

Step Two: Assignment

In class, I assigned one of four topics to each student: Corrupt Bargain 1824, the Nullification Crisis 1832–33, The Alamo 1836, and the Trail of Tears 1838–39. These topics were specific enough to focus, but generic enough to provide ample research.

Student were told to use the Teachinghistory.org website's History Content Gateway to find, read, and analyze ONE primary document pertaining to their assigned topic.

They were then asked to share their findings with their classmates via the Wiki by answering four basic questions about their source. If they completed this part of the assignment thoroughly and with attention to detail, they received 75% of the total points possible.

The final 25% was earned by engaging in a discussion (certainly defined differently by each student) with at least one other student in the class who had the same assigned topic.

To see the actual assignment, the Wiki, and the student responses, click the link below.

http://gorrwebwiki.pbworks.com/w/page/31880259/GORRWEB-WIKI

(Note: Wiki access requires a username and password. If you'd like to see the Wiki in full, follow the link, click the "Request Access" button on the right side, and fill out the form. It may take some time for you to receive a response. Alternatively, download this PDF of the page.)

Step Three: Discussion

While the online discussion is interesting and some student really got into it, there were quite a few who met the minimum requirement and moved on.

Since the existing curricular structure of this unit asked students to take an online quiz the night before we discussed the material in class, time for discussing the primary source activity was already built into my schedule. (We did have to add an extra half day to complete it!)

By the end of the day, we had not only talked about the four content-specific areas assigned to each student, but we had covered the entire scope of the chapter.

When the students came to class after completing the Wiki assignment, I simply asked each student to present their document in 1–2 minutes. Throughout this process, students who participated in the online component of the assignment were excited to continue sharing their ideas and opinions about the documents they saw. Other students were pulled into the conversation, and by the end of the day, we had not only talked about the four content-specific areas assigned to each student, but we had covered the entire scope of the chapter. In short, I replaced a lecture with an effective discussion!

Step Four: Assessment

Assessing the students was quite simple. I read their original posts and then I looked for their online discussion. I based their grades on my perceived effort and degree of detail they put into their posts. I did not formally assess their discussions, but I suppose I could in the future.

As far as my own assessment of the entire project, here are some of my observations and thoughts:

  • Throughout this entire process, I found that most of my students enjoyed the online aspect of the assignment.
  • I loved that I was able to incorporate all of these primary sources into an already existing unit.
  • I really enjoyed the online discussions between the kids who really got into it. They were insightful and interesting to read.
  • I use the online discussion portion as an opportunity to emphasize the difference between your academic online persona vs. your social persona. We discussed the importance of having an appropriate email address for jobs, colleges, teachers, etc. I discouraged texting shorthand and slang in academic discussions. I even went over proper techniques for complimenting, critiquing, and assessing other classmate's posts. I thought it was a fantastic side effect of this project.

    • Overall, I thought this assignment accomplished every one of the goals I set. I intend to repeat a similar assignment in the second semester. In addition, it is my hope that by building research competence in my students, I will be able to create a DBQ creation exercise for the latter part of the school year. (See one of my upcoming blogs for more information on that!)

    I hope this information was helpful and please feel free to contact me (rmgorr at comcast dot net) with any questions, comments, or concerns. I'd love to hear how you use primary documents in your classes.

For more information

Interested in starting up a Wiki of your own? Read our Tech for Teachers entry on Wikis for ideas on how to get started.

Teaching About Haiti

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Any human disaster anywhere in the world jars our sensibilities, reminds us of our interconnectedness, and challenges our worldview.

The devastation in Haiti hits us intellectually, emotionally, and ethically, and we ask "how can I help?" A contagious call to action multiplies. But the immediacy of media coverage, continued stories and images of Haiti's people and places, the massive national and global response from individuals, celebrities, institutions and organizations still leave us grasping for a more complete sense of what's happened and why. Headlines spur a teaching moment in the history classroom.

Broadly speaking, teaching materials focus on two approaches: the history of Haiti and the history of natural disasters. Fewer resources are available for the former, but here are a few to jumpstart discussion.

American history textbooks are strangely silent on the subject of Haiti.

We find few answers to questions about the history of Haiti and the relationship of the United States to that country in American history textbooks. Yet, the only successful slave revolt in history took place there in the aftermath of the American and French Revolutions, culminating with Haiti's declaration of independence from France in 1803 and ideologically infused, in part, by the return of freedmen of color sent to fight in the American Revolution. Haiti was, in fact, hotly contested territory, an economic jewel sought by the British, Americans, French, and Spanish. American history textbooks, however, generally consign the Haitian Revolution to a couple of paragraphs, and the subsequent history of the country itself is subsumed under themes of foreign policy and America's extension into the global economic and political sphere.

The history of Haiti and America's relationship with that country raise critical issues of race and foreign policy.

These online resources help fill informational gaps on the history of Haiti and America's relationship to that country.

Starting with an encyclopedia is sometimes a good idea—as long as it isn't the endpoint, as the founder of Wikipedia is the first to say. And Wikipedia's History of Haiti entry is a comprehensive place to find an overview and directions for further inquiry.

To Heal Haiti, Look to History, Not Nature in the New York Times oped section (January 21, 2010) comprehensively highlights Haiti's history and America's relationship with that country. Author Mark Danner recently published Stripping Bare the Body: Politics, Violence, War which chronicles political conflict in Haiti, the Balkans, Iraq and the United States. "...there is nothing mystical in Haiti’s pain, no inescapable curse that haunts the land. From independence and before, Haiti’s harms have been caused by men, not demons," he writes.

At the History News Network (HNN), several entries by historians in Roundup: Talking About History are valuable. Scroll down the list of entries (or hit Control F and enter Haiti in your Find field) and look for America's Historic Debt to Haiti by Robert Parry and The Televangelist Misuse of Haiti's History by Juan Cole for analysis uniting past and present.

Also on HNN, Why We are Partly Responsible for the Mess that is Haiti by Thomas Fleming looks back at early days of Haitian independence. Barely ensconced in the White House, Thomas Jefferson and the French began negotiations for taking back the country. It's an exciting tale of international intrigue and ideological influence, a backstory to the Louisiana Purchase.

CNN provides a timeline of Haiti's history from the CIA World Factbook. In fact, CNN's Homepage is an excellent consolidated resource for continuously updated news approaching the devastation from multiple perspectives: history, economics, society, and culture.

To brush up on Haiti's revolutionary leader of the 18th century, visit Toussaint L'Ouverture Project, a wiki on the Haitian Revolution, 1791-1804, and linked blog relating materials to the present day. (While you'll find valuable essays and primary sources here, the provenance and credentials of its creators are obscure. As with any source material, cross-referencing is a good idea.)

We need a deeper understanding of the history and roots of poverty in Haiti, according to Teaching for Change.

Teaching for Change, a Washington, DC-based organization, encourages teachers and students to question and re-think the world inside and outside their classrooms. They, too, point out "While students should be encouraged to contribute to relief efforts, it is also important to gain a deeper understanding of the history and the roots of the poverty in Haiti. The US has been involved with Haiti for centuries, yet it has received little attention in textbooks or the curriculum." Teaching for Change recently posted a free, downloadable 43-page booklet, Teaching About Haiti. Their caveat: the book was last reprinted in 1994, and some of the statistics are dated; yet the history, songs, oral histories, and literature are very useful for students in elementary, middle, and high schools.

Edsitement from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) offers a lesson plan for high school students including primary sources, student activity materials, and maps. "To Elect Good Men": Woodrow Wilson and Latin America" focuses on Wilson's attempts to carry out missionary diplomacy in Haiti and Mexico and the responses of selected Haitians and Mexicans.

More from News Media

5 Ways to Teach About Haiti Right Now and Resources for Teaching and Learning About the Earthquake in Haiti from The New York Times Learning Network offer lesson plans on past and recent Haitian history (and materials on natural disasters).

On the PBS Newshour, a ninth grader living in America writes about fear for his brother and other family members back in Haiti and his hopes for his native country in Haitian-American Teen Reflects on Haiti Disaster. For more about the effects of the disaster on Haitian children in America, also see an article and audio slide show, Haiti’s Aftershocks Felt at a School in New York, from the New York Times. The Times also provides continuously updated Perspectives on Haiti's Earthquake videos from Haitian citizens, academic experts, aid providers, and journalists.

On CBS, Catie Couric talks with Mark Schneider of the international Crisis Group and looks at the history of poverty and oppression in Haiti that has exacerbated the relief effort. (2:44 minutes, NOT commercial-free) The Crisis Group is considered the world’s leading independent, non-partisan, source of analysis and advice to governments, and intergovernmental bodies like the United Nations, European Union, and World Bank, on the prevention and resolution of deadly conflict. Materials about Haiti address the country's political, social, and economic conditions.

Also from CBS, A Haiti Primer: Haiti's History: Revolution, Subjugation gives a brief narrative of Haitian history from the time Christopher Columbus claimed the land he named Hispaniola for the King of Spain.

More Primary Sources

A search in the Abraham Lincoln papers in the Library of Congress yields letters to the President from various sources concerning plans to colonize Haiti with freed African Americans during and after the Civil War. In part, these plans developed as a corollary to white post-emancipation racial fears; in part, they were conceived to counter increased Spanish colonization of the island. Motivated by racism, America did not give diplomatic recognition to Haiti until 1862—long after most European nations.

Searching across collections in American Memory also turns up photographs of Haitian street scenes from the early 20th century and various historical maps.

Bookmark This! World War II Interactive Collection: Free From Footnote (December only)

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Footnote.com is a pre-eminent web resource for digitized primary source documents. It's a subscription service costing about $50 annually or $12 monthly, but the site regularly offers free access to some of its resources for specified time periods.

During December, Footnote is granting free access to WWII records. Read first-hand accounts of submarine missions or reports of missing air crews. Explore the USS Arizona Memorial or view over 80,000 photos from the US Army Air Force. Other WWII records on Footnote.com include:

Visitors to Footnote.com can also honor WWII veterans by creating or contributing to Hero Pages.

Many of Footnote's digitized resources are available at no cost on other sites—particularly government archives—however, Footnote offers the helpful, time-saving advantage of topical, thematic consolidation and categorization. Their non-exclusive partnership with the National Archives increases access to collections such as the Mathew Brady Collection of Civil War Photographs and Papers of the Continental Congress. While these digitized documents are currently viewable only through paid subscription, the agreement with NARA specifies their online availability free-of-charge after an interval of five years.

Definitely worth a visit!

Primary Sources, Historical Reenactments, and Twitter

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Earlier this week, The Chronicle of Higher Education reported on a reenactment of the Battle of Gettysburg.

At this reenactment, participants didn't discuss the authenticity of their uniforms or whether today's weather reflected actual battlefield conditions. Rather, the emphasis lay in communicating the historical voices of Gettysburg in 1863 based on texts of primary source documents.

The participants? History buffs who assumed the roles of historic persona from President Abraham Lincoln to Union and Confederate officers to foot soldiers to the press.

The venue? Twitter!

Direct quotes from primary sources are the foundation of Twitter historical reenactment.

Scholars Tom Caswell and Marion Jensen developed the concept detailed at twhistory.com, and discussed, of course, on Twitter, @twhistory. The twhistory archive chronicles the Twitter account of Gettysburg. Caswell and Jensen believe that such re-enactments can be used as learning exercises for students, who can be assigned to research historical diaries and other sources in order to write the tweets. According to Caswell's Chronicle interview, "Each Twitter account in the re-enactment represents a historical figure, and you are trying to portray that person's actions as accurately as possible. We use the first person to give the feeling that the event is happening in real time." In fact, they encourage tweeting exact quotes from primary sources.

Twitter reenactments integrate personal and educational technology applications.

A St. Louis high school teacher is testing the concept and the medium in her classroom with a reenactment of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Under the title MICDS Cuban Missile Crisis: can't we all just get along? her students have assumed the roles of Robert McNamara, John Kennedy, Dean Rusk, Fidel Castro and others to tweet events from the top down.

Getting Started points reenactment projects toward the tools they need and gives directions for their use, including tools for managing Tweets in order to follow all the historical figures who are participating— a critical element for conceptualizing what is happening when.

Assessing Learning

Twitter reenactments appear as an innovative teaching methodology for engaging students in primary source materials. It would be helpful to see a lesson plan rubric laying out learning objectives, scaffolding, and assessment standards for both historical content and technology—including adaptive writing styles for Twitter.

It's time to turn new media into learning tools.

Projects such as twhistory offer the possibility of bridging the gap between student personal use of laptops and mobile devices and their educational uses. The Joan Ganz Cooney Center, a creation of the Sesame Street founder, offers a number of scholarly white papers supporting such digital learning. The mission of the Center is to foster innovation in children's learning through digital media, and Cooney points out that "Now is the time to turn the new media that children have a natural attraction to into learning tools that will build their knowledge and broaden their perspectives."

The free industry brief in PDF, Pockets of Potential: Using Mobile Technologies to Promote Children's Learning found on the Center's publications page offers a thorough exposition on the state-of-the-art, the potential, and the pluses and minuses of the technologies that enable learning experiences such as twhistory's Twitter reenactments.

(For another look at tweeting with primary sources, revisit our earlier blog post ROTFLOL?* President John Quincy Adams Twittered?)

ROTFLOL?* President John Quincy Adams Twittered?

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Here's a creative possibility to bring your students into the often-obscure primary source materials of the late-17th and early-18th century. Although perhaps not ROTFLOL.*

Recently a graduate student from Boston's Simmons College visiting the Massachusetts Historical Society noticed that short, line-a-day entries in the diaries of John Quincy Adams, sixth president of the United States, read an awful lot like messages on Twitter.

According to The Beehive, the official blog of the Historical Society, Adams kept multiple diaries simultaneously and filled 51 volumes over 69 years. For the most part, the line-a-day entries are found in a single volume covering the years 1795 through 1801, then 1809 to 1836.

9/8/1809: Head winds. Calm. Thick fog, and mist. No Obs: Lat: 59-40. Long: 5-17. Agis and Cleomenes. Cards.

So, historians decided to extend the outreach of the archives and gave Adams his own Twitter feed. They currently post a daily entry taken verbatim from the Adams diary. Current entries for September follow his journey to St Petersburg begun in August 1809 as America's first Russian ambassador (or Minister Plenipotentiary, as the title was at that time). The posts link to maps tracing his travels, his reading lists, and to other diary entries digitized on the Historical Society website. Adams's Tweets are generally shorter than Twitter's 140-character limit, and as an added bonus, the digitized diaries reveal that unlike many of his compatriots, Adams's penmanship was impeccable and, therefore, largely readable.

Interested in the educational applications of Twitter? Check out the Clearinghouse entry on Twitter in the Tools for Teachers section.

*ROTFLOL: Rolling on the Floor Laughing Out Loud

Primary Sources: 100 Milestone Documents

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The website 100 Milestone Documents chronicles United States history from 1776 to 1965 through a chronologically-ordered compilation of primary sources. Cosponsored by National History Day and the National Archives, the selected materials range from Richard Henry Lee's resolution for independence in 1776 to the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Each entry includes background information, images of the document (online or accessible as PDFs), a transcription, links to related documents, and teaching suggestions. The section Tools for Educators also includes a sourcebook for working with the documents and other ideas for teachers.

Questioning what's not there can be as educational as looking at what's included.

The documents focus on America's legal, diplomatic, and political history: six Supreme Court decisions, 24 presidential speeches or orders, 44 legislative acts, 20 treaties or international declarations, and five documents dealing with important inventions (from the cotton gin to the nuclear bomb).

You won't find speeches and writings from racial or ethnic minorities or from women included here, as a critical review on History Matters points out. Nonetheless, we sometimes learn as much from questioning omissions as inclusions, and at the least, the top-down perspective of the selections reflects prevailing mentalities and influences at the time people in power generated them.

Our Documents does offer ready and consolidated access to pivotal materials generated at critical moments in U.S. history. They are milestones, and their impact isn't a question—only perhaps the perspective of the compilation.

(Also take a moment to explore The People's Vote with accompanying comments—an initiative requesting the public to order these documents according to their importance.)

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